


Duty of Candor

by the_wordbutler



Series: Motion Practice [24]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Legal Drama, motion practice universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 17:07:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1518497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wordbutler/pseuds/the_wordbutler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are things Nick Fury never told the public when he first ran for office.  </p>
<p>They all concern what happened fifteen years ago, back when he worked in the attorney general’s office—and back before he married his wife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Duty of Candor

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the end of Diversions. This story takes place in early October 2013 in the Motion Practice Universe, approximately one month after Diversions and during the course of Chain of Custody. Although it will reference some events of Chain of Custody, it will not spoil anything that happens in that story. Also, this story references some events in Cardboard Hedgehog, specifically “The Birthday” and “The Labor Day Party.” You are not required to read Cardboard Hedgehog to understand this story, but it may provide a tiny bit of context. 
> 
> I’ve slightly changed how Ames deals with attorney discipline because system I created in Motion Practice made no sense when compared with reality. Now that I’ve gone through the bar admission process and am a bit more familiar with attorney discipline, I’ve tweaked a few things. I know this is not important, but just as an FYI.
> 
> Loud, boisterous, appreciative thanks to my betas, Jen and saranoh, who embraced a very long one-shot story with open arms and never once questioned my sanity. At least, not _to_ me.

“Tonight, on _Suffolk County: Unmasked_ ,” the newscaster on the television in the bedroom says, her tone so full of scandal that Nick suspects she just might spontaneously combust, “we ask experts if you’re paying too much for your produce. The answer might surprise you.”

As heartless a guy as strangers usually think he is, it turns out that Nick Fury only _really_ hates three things: career politicians who’ve never worked a real day in their life, that kind of fancy chocolate so damn dark that you might as well just eat cocoa powder right out of the tin, and the sleazy local “news” program _Suffolk County: Unmasked_. Every advertisement’s the exact same as the one before, some pretty little news girl frowning severely between clumsy shots of abandoned buildings or overweight joggers, and they all turn his stomach. He actually stops hunting around for a decent pair of socks to paw through the bedsheets and find the remote, because he’d rather dress in silence than listen to Pretty Newscaster Number Five drone on about—

“And what about the secret life of District Attorney Nick Fury?” the woman asks suddenly, and he freezes right in his tracks. The shot of him on the screen’s from a press conference at least five years ago, Phil Coulson standing at his shoulder and frowning seriously. Nick can’t even remember the case. The scandalized news girl talks over the footage like the world’s worst lip-synching. “Sources close to the district attorney reveal new information that he’s kept from his constituents. Tune in tonight to find out more!”

The clip ends abruptly, flickering right into a commercial for a local mattress shop, and Nick finds the remote halfway under his wife’s pillow. He shuts the TV off but ends up standing next to the bed for way too long, his reflection distorted in the dark, flat screen. It’s a quiet Sunday morning, the very start to the kind of day they love best, one where nobody needs to work or rush off to ball practice and they can spend a lazy day around the house. They’d planned to split the kids, run a couple errands, maybe use the tail end of their Indian summer to reseal the deck before the weather turned bad. Now, Nick thinks, he’ll be lucky if they—

“ _Dad_ ,” a voice whines, and a second later, there’s a barnacle glued to his side. He sighs, but the barnacle just wriggles and clings to his shirt. “I need help with my hair.”

He glances down. Beth’s half-dressed, with her favorite giraffe t-shirt on over a pair of pink leopard pajama pants, and her hair’s a mass of messy curls. She pushes one clump out of her face, and he rolls his eye. “Since when is it my job to do your hair?” 

“Since Mama turned the TV up and told the boys to stop talking because you were on the news,” Beth reports. He frowns, and she presses her cheek against his side. “Were you on the news because of bad guys?”

“Maybe,” he answers, ‘cause that’s the best he can offer, right now.

“Did you _catch_ the bad guys?”

“Don’t I always?” he replies, and she beams at him. He nods over to the bed, leaving her to climb up on the pile of messed-up covers and present her crazy hair. He’s never quite mastered the art of dressing and styling a little girl—he’s great with the boys, but they’ve never thrown a full-out tantrum about a sparkly shirt being in the dirty pile. Still, he can do a mean braid, and Beth hums to herself as he wrestles the curls into some semblance of sanity.

Fall sunlight trickles in through the curtains. The window’s cracked, letting in a tiny breeze but no sound. They live on a quiet street, tucked away from the kind of activity that’s rampant in the other parts of the county. It’s like you’d expect out of some old 1950s sitcom: everybody knows everybody else while respecting their privacy, kids ride their bikes in the cul-de-sac, the woman on the corner churns out casseroles for every birth and funeral on the block. It feels mundane and safe, even if Nick knows those are both lies people tell themselves so they can sleep at night.

He thinks about the damn newscaster, and his hand slips. “Daddy!” Beth squeaks, and plasters a hand to the back of her head.

“Sorry,” he mutters, and he reaches for the hair elastic she’s wearing around her wrist. The braid’s a little crooked, but it holds, and she grins at him when he tugs it a little. “Go tell your mom I’ll be down in a couple minutes,” he says as she scrambles off the bed. “I need to find socks.”

Beth scowls at him. “You have a million socks, and they’re all the same.”

“Says the girl who fights about whether she wants to wear the socks with the lacy bits or not,” he returns, and when he makes like he’s gonna tug her braid again, she laughs and runs out of the room.

Nick waits ‘til her bare feet thunder down the stairs before he grabs his phone off the bedside table and opens the browser. A quick Google search for _Suffolk County: Unmasked_ plus his name brings up a tiny teaser article on the show’s shitty 1990s-era website, but no real information. A quick search for his name alone offers links to the county website, the District Attorney’s website, a dozen newspaper articles, and—in the depths of Google’s third page—the useless teaser.

He rubs a hand over the back of his neck for a second, the results peering up at him. Finally, he switches over to his text menu and opens up a new message.

_You got a half hour for me this afternoon?_

The answer chimes through a couple seconds later, once Nick’s standing in front of his sock drawer again. _I can make the time._

_Didn’t know domestic bliss trumped a meeting with your boss._

_My boss doesn’t request meetings in the form of a question. My friend does._ Nick snorts and shakes his head, but before he can pull up the keyboard, another text message pops up. _Is everything okay?_

_Google that shitty unmasked news show and my name, and then you tell me_ , he returns, and he locks his cell before he shoves it in his pocket.

The house feels still and quiet when he steps out of the bedroom and into the hallway, and the illusion’s not really broken ‘til he’s all the way downstairs and can hear Beth’s voice carrying in from the kitchen. She’s babbling excitedly about something—the kid’s like a flower, you offer her a little sunshine and she’ll bloom all over you—and just for a second, Nick smiles. He stands in the hallway and listens, missing the individual words for all the warmth she carries with it—and for a second, he forgets about everything else.

He remembers again when somebody says, “You were on the news again.” He blinks, a little surprised, and finds Alex standing in the doorway to the basement, his long arms clinging to the trim on the top of the doorframe. Nick raises an eyebrow at him, and he huffs as he drops his arms to his side. “Mom said not to worry about it, but it sounded kind of bad.”

“Your mom likes to blow things out of proportion,” Nick reminds him.

“His mom also heard that,” another voice chimes in, and the victorious smile drops right off Alex’s face. He ducks his head to hide the last hint of amusement, and standing a couple feet away, Nick purses his lips to keep from snorting a laugh. “Go downstairs and finish cleaning up. Your brother will be down when he’s finished with the dishwasher.”

Alex’s eyes snap up. “But—”

“Do _not_ make me repeat myself.”

The warning sends the kid right back down the stairs, and Nick finally turns far enough that he can see over his left shoulder. His wife looms in the doorway between the kitchen and the front hall, her hands on her hips and her mouth pinched like she’s all of a half-second from laughing. She’s beautiful when she laughs, so overflowing with light that she might blind you, but he knows that laughter’s a million miles away right about now.

He wets his lips. A couple feet away, the hard line of her shoulders starts to soften. “Please tell me this is another harmless news story because Stark ran his mouth,” she says.

“I don’t know _what_ it is,” he admits. Her jaw clenches, and he closes the distance between them so he can rest a hand on her side, just above her waist. She’s wearing jeans and plain gray t-shirt, a far cry from the sharp suit she wore the first time he laid eyes on her, but damned if she doesn’t still tip into his touch. “I’m gonna call a couple people, see if maybe they’ve heard _something_ about what that shitstorm that calls itself a news show ‘unmasked’ this time around. For all we know, they finally figured out that I changed my name when I hit eighteen.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not sure that’s the sort of news they deal in.”

“They’re heading up the program with the scandalous price of produce, so you never know,” he replies, and her mouth quirks into a tiny smile. He spreads his fingers along her side and feels when she starts to relax in his grip. When she tilts her head up, though, the worry on her face’s clear as day. “And, since I think you need it, here’s your weekly reminder that only one of us is a public figure, and it sure as hell isn’t you.”

She slugs him for that, just one solid sock in the shoulder, but her hands land on his forearms instead of back on her hips. They stand there for a second, the two of them alone in a house usually commanded by a chatty eight-year-old and her chore-hating brothers. He strokes his thumb along his wife’s shirt until she sighs.

“This could be because of what happened with Skye,” she says quietly, and he knows from experience that the catch in the back of her voice is at least one-third betrayal. “I’d told her to leave it alone, she pushed, and now—”

“We don’t even know what this is,” Nick interrupts, and she tilts her head at him like he’s one of the kids. He raises a hand. “Don’t roast your friend on a spit ‘cause she did her job, Mel. Ask her, but— Ask her gently. Just like I’ll ask Phil.”

“Skye and Phil are two very different people.”

“Don’t I know it?” he retorts, and his wife, former assistant attorney general and legendary attorney badass Melinda May, offers him one small smile as reward for the awful joke.

 

==

 

“Get dressed,” Melinda orders Skye two hours later, and the other woman nearly falls out of her tiny underwear.

The loft is almost too warm when Melinda steps in, her boots echoing on the high hardwood floors. She’s not certain who exactly Skye expected to be standing on the other side of her door, but either way, the man’s t-shirt she’s wearing over her panties leaves nothing to the imagination. Skye realizes this only after she’s closed the door, too, and Melinda watches her face flood with red. She grabs the robe that’s lying on the couch (among blankets, two different dog-eared novels, and an empty paper bag from Chipotle) and wraps it tightly around her body. She ties it hastily, and the sash hangs at an awkward angle.

A few feet away, there’s a scruffy-haired man wearing nothing but a pair of gray boxer shorts standing in the open-plan kitchen. He opens his mouth, but when Melinda raises an eyebrow at him, he snaps it shut again. His Adam’s apple bobs when he swallows. “I didn’t know you were expecting company,” he says, his eyes flitting to Skye.

“She wasn’t,” Melinda answers tensely.

“Uh, right.” He looks nervously between the two of them before his attention finally settles on Melinda. “You want some coffee?”

Skye’s jaw tightens. Melinda suspects she’s gritting her teeth to avoid rolling her eyes. “Can you give us, like, ten minutes?”

The man glances at the coffee pot. “I’m still waiting on—”

“Ten minutes,” Skye grinds out, and Scruffy raises both his hands as he backs out of the kitchen. There’s a line of Japanese characters stretching across his abs just above the navel. Melinda’s fairly sure they misstate a famous proverb of some kind.

The bedroom door shuts, leaving them in absolute silence. Melinda rests her hands on her hips and levels Skye a glance, and the other woman pulls her robe tighter. She’s spent the last two hours in a state of purgatory, Googling and re-Googling various combinations of her name, Nick’s name, _Suffolk County: Unmasked_ , and a dozen other search terms, and now she’s here, standing in front of one of her few friends, waiting.

Nick’d told her not to roast Skye on a spit, but right now—

She pulls in a breath. “What do you know about _Suffolk County: Unmasked_?” she asks.

Skye blinks. “ _Suff_ — You mean that cheesy scandal show that’s the weird three-way lovechild of CSPAN, TMZ, and the conspiracy theory political blog from the _Bugle_?” Melinda almost smiles, but she nods, too. “Uh, I literally just told you everything I know about it. Why?”

“Because one of their stories tonight is the ‘secret life of Nick Fury,’” Melinda answers, “and you’re one of about three people who knows what that is.”

Skye freezes at that, her shoulders softening and her eyes immediately dropping to the floor. Melinda’s reminded for a half-second of frightened witnesses caught in lies, and the momentary flashback turns her stomach.

“It wasn’t me,” Skye says, and there’s a pink flush along her cheekbones as she stares somewhere just below Melinda’s shoulder. “I know what you probably think, and I’d think it too, but— Look, what happened with the photos, all that time ago, that wasn’t—”

Melinda snorts slightly, almost a laugh, and Skye jerks like she’s just suffered an electrical shock. Melinda shakes her head. “You went through our personal folders,” she points out.

“No,” Skye retorts immediately. She jabs a finger into the air between them, then retracts it when she catches Melinda’s eyes. “I mean, okay, yeah. I went into your hubby’s personal folder. But that was only after the whole scare with the Trojan getting into the system and me backtracking through literally ten _thousand_ e-mails in a single weekend.” She hugs the robe more closely to her body. “You guys talked, like, six times a day. I got curious.”

“You got nosy,” Melinda corrects.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I sold your secrets to the freaking news!” Skye throws out her arms, suddenly animated, and Melinda feels the cold hand of guilt run its spindly fingers up her spin. “I know what you and just about everybody else in that building thinks,” she continues, shaking her head. “I’m the joke, the weird computer nerd in the basement. Hand me a pocket protector and I’m good to go, right?” She drags her fingers through her hair. “Do you know how many people know the rest of the stuff about me? The part where I dropped out of high school, or failed my GED twice because I decided to get stoned the night before, or how I could only take my programming classes by correspondence because no _actual_ school would admit me? Because I can count those people on one hand, and you’re one of them.” 

Melinda looks out the window at the quickly-clouding Sunday morning. 

“It sucks that somebody ratted you out,” Skye says finally, after several seconds of long, heavy silence stretch between them. “But it’s not me.”

“It’s someone.” 

“Or it’s nobody because the story’s not about you,” Skye hazards, and Melinda glances away from the window to blink at her. Skye, who’s apparently started filling two coffee mugs, shrugs. “I mean, here’s what I know: something forced you out of your old job, drove you guys down to Suffolk County, and when Fury decided to run for D.A., you both decided that your relationship might be a pretty good lie of omission.” She nudges one of the mugs in Melinda’s direction. “I miss anything?” 

Melinda catches herself nearly smiling. “I really should stop drinking vodka with you.”

“I’m sorry, but _everyone_ should drink vodka with me. It’s pretty much like a life-woe truth serum.” Skye hoists herself up onto the counter and swigs her coffee. “But seriously, even with all that stuff, how do you know that the show tonight’s about you? How do you know it’s not something your hubby did?”

“Because I _know_.” The sound of her own voice surprises Melinda, and she helps herself to the waiting coffee mug. She knows Skye’s watching her carefully, and she thinks for a moment that computer experts and attorneys share a lot of characteristics: attention to detail, cautious observation, and the uncanny ability to stand back and watch a train derail in absolute silence. She sighs. “What happened when I was at the attorney general’s office was complicated,” she says, shaking her head. “It was enough to almost ruin my career, never mind what it could do to Nick.”

Skye shrugs. “People like him a lot, you know.”

“I’m not sure they’ll like him as much when they know how many things he’s skirted around telling them,” Melinda answers. Skye purses her lips, and Melinda leans against the counter, the mug cupped between her palms. “You can count the number of people who know your story on one hand. I can count mine on one finger.”

“Your ring finger, I’m guessing,” Skye replies.

This time, Melinda allows a half-second smile to cross her face. “Something like that,” she responds, and sips her coffee. 

Skye nods for a moment, her bare legs swinging idly against the cabinets. After a few swallows of coffee, though, she sets down her mug and leans back onto her hands. “Okay, so, look. I’m no expert in relationships or whatever—and that’s not an invitation to comment on the piece of ass I banished into my bedroom, either.” Melinda chuckles, and Skye points a finger at her until she raises a hand in silent defeat. “But I lived with a lot of really dysfunctional families, growing up the way I did, and you and Fury are _so_ on the other side of that spectrum it is not even funny. Like, I helped Tony Stark program 90 birthday reminders for his husband into Outlook and you and your guy still win the awesome couple award.” Melinda glances down at her coffee and watches the steam rise in soft whirls. “I totally get that somebody’s airing your dirty laundry for the world to see, but it’s not like you and your hubby won’t get through this, right? I mean, you didn’t just survive whatever weird prosecutorial pariah thing you went through, you created small people and still managed to get him elected district freaking attorney.”

“Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“Is it?” When Melinda glances over, Skye raises both her hands. “The political liability part, that makes total sense to me. And if some of the stuff that’s out there is super confidential black-prosecution-ops kind of information, yeah, I’d want to watch my back, too.” She drops her hands into her lap and plays with the end of her robe’s sash. “But even if all that goes totally tits up and he loses his next election, you’re still two of the best attorneys I know, at home with your law degrees and your kids and a united front about whatever happens next—and I think that’s kind of cool.”

Melinda releases a huff of breath. It surprises her how much it feels like a tiny laugh. “It’s less charming when he’s disciplining our eight-year-old, you know.”

“Yeah, see, as much as I like your kid, I’m just going to forget you even said that.” Skye slides off the counter with her still half-full mug. “But speaking of things I’d rather forget—”

Melinda smirks. “Your date?”

“Funny how ‘date’ and ‘mistake’ kind of sound the same if you’re drunk.” Skye tops off her coffee but then turns to glance in Melinda’s direction. “Listen, if you want me to just help him find his jeans and throw him out so we can chat, I—”

“I really don’t want you looking at yourself in the mirror twenty years from now and wishing you’d made better use of all—that.” When she gestures to Skye with her mug, Skye breaks into a grin. “I know how to let myself out when I finish my coffee.”

“And how to call me if you get, like, majorly grumpy cat and need someone to talk you down off the ledge.” Melinda rolls her eyes, but purposely bumps her shoulder into Skye’s as she passes on the way to the bedroom. Skye grins like the Cheshire cat, her eyes as too-warm as the loft itself, and winks as she disappears into the other half of the apartment.

Melinda laughs and shakes her head, but the mirth passes too quickly. In the end, she’s left alone in the silence, armed only with her coffee and a storm of worries in her stomach.

The mug’s still two-thirds full when she abandons it on the counter and heads home.

 

==

 

“It might not be as bad as you’re expecting,” Phil Coulson says, calm as anything, and Nick turns to glare at him with his one good eye.

The one advantage to global climate change—or whatever the hell scientists are calling the last ten years of screwed-up weather this month—is that October’s started out warm and sunny, a month that exists in picture books but never in their sleepy little state. It’s still easy to coax the kids out of the house in weather like this, tricking them into long bike rides or sending them out onto the driveway with sidewalk chalk before they drive their parents or each other crazy. He conned the boys into packing a basketball with them as he loaded them into the car, Beth’s strapped into her roller blades and more padding than a professional football player, and now they’re all at the park down by Phil’s place. The boys—well, Jackson, who’s loud-mouthed as Nick but with about half the tact—have already convinced a couple local kids into playing a game of _horse_ that’s more smack-talk than actual shooting, and Beth’s looping the court, mocking every miss and teasing her brothers.

Just a normal October afternoon, then.

Except for the part where Nick can feel the walls starting to crumble, chips of brick falling and waiting for the rest to crash down on top of them.

For a second, he regrets not dropping a flask in his pocket on the way out the door.

“Whatever they’re planning’s a lot bigger than their usual five minutes of grainy camera footage and shitty background music,” Nick replies, and next to him on the park bench, Phil’s mouth curls into sly little smile. “I called the station, told them I was _real_ interested in that ‘liberal asshole district attorney’ they were running the story on, but they wouldn’t tell me anything in advance, not even who’s reporting it. They’ve got something good up their sleeves, whatever it is.”

“And you really think it’s about Melinda?” Phil asks, the smile slipping off his face in record time.

“The problem’s that I don’t know what to think,” Nick replies, and Phil rolls his lips together as he nods.

They fall quiet for a couple seconds, Phil staring out at the kids and Nick studying his face, waiting for some tic that’ll show his friend has all the answers. He’s known Phil for a long time, long enough to know that the man finds enlightenment in the silence of his own head the way Stark finds it while pacing and talking to himself, and he appreciates it a thousand times more, right about now. Really, he appreciates _Phil_ , a man without secrets who’s kept Nick’s ever since Jackson broke his arm at day care right in the middle of a trial and Phil, new to the office and Nick’s second chair, stepped in to handle everything. 

When Nick finally sat him down and told him the parts of the story he didn’t already know—that the guy with the big corner office and his name on all their important documents had a family he’d kept out of the press all through his campaign—he’d shrugged and said, “How secret do you want me to keep it?”

There was a reason he and Melinda’d chosen Phil to be Beth’s godfather, after all.

Finally, Phil casts him an even glance, his face so tightly drawn that Nick knows he’s fighting against his own form of worry. “They’re smart,” he says carefully, and Nick nods in agreement. “They run these kinds of stories all the time. They won’t report anything libelous.”

“But they’ll sure as hell skirt _right_ on the edge until the viewers don’t know whether it’s truth, or a lie, or something in between.” Nick shakes his head and leans forward, his elbows resting on his thighs. “Truth of the matter is, I don’t care what people think of me. I’m pushing sixty. It’s probably time I thought about retiring, spending time with the kids, fixing the bathroom molding that Mel’s always bitching about, whatever.” He hears Phil snort next to him, and for a second, he almost smiles. “But this isn’t just gonna be about me and some lie of omission I told to protect my family. It’s gonna drag everything that happened in Washington County back into the limelight, and everything—my work, Mel’s work, our personal lives, our _kids’_ lives—is gonna be under a microscope.” 

“If you weathered it back then,” Phil points out, “you can weather it again.”

“We were different people back then, and you know it,” Nick retorts, and when he glances up at Phil, the guy looks back out across the park. “We didn’t have a family. We weren’t even married. We were barely into our careers, fooling around more than anything else, then everything went to shit and—” He sighs and shakes his head all over again. “It brought us together, the last time, but I don’t know what’ll happen if it all gets dragged up again.”

Phil shifts the way he’s sitting, a stall for time if Nick’s ever seen one. “Have you called Brand?”

Nick snorts and rolls his eye. “The last thing I need right now is that woman blowing smoke up my ass.”

“She wouldn’t be able to tell you if anything new surfaced in the original case, no,” Phil presses, “but she’d—”

“Screw me around and leave me with twice as many questions and exactly zero answers?” Nick cuts in, and this time, Phil rolls his eyes. Against his better judgment, Nick flashes a grin in his direction. “Still not over your little intellectual crush.”

Phil crosses his arms like one of Nick’s boys, adolescently sulky. “I’d hardly describe it as a crush.”

“You just keep telling yourself that,” Nick replies, and when Phil screws up his face like he just sucked on a fresh lemon, he gives in and lets himself laugh for a couple seconds.

Phil’s cell phone interrupts them, tinkling merrily in his pocket, and Nick only feels his smile slip away once he’s glancing back over at the kids on the ball court. Jackson and another kid around his age are sitting cross-legged on the ground behind the hoop, egging on Alex as he measures out a long-range shot. They’re both gangly boys, too tall for almost-twelve and always running into shit, but Jackson prefers sports that require a whole lot of patience over the fast pace of basketball or swim team. Sometimes, Nick actually forgets that Jackson and his brother are twins—except for how they look pretty much identical.

Phil chuckles at his phone, and Nick glances over just in time to watch him tuck it back into his pocket. “Clint says that I am under no circumstances allowed to make you my best man because it would, quote, ‘totally freak him out on his wedding day.’” 

Nick almost grins again. “That what he thinks we’re doing out here?” Phil shrugs an answer, and Nick narrows his eye. “How’s the wedding planning going, anyway? He still on board with the whole ‘Coulson family farm’ experience?”

“We’ve already talked to just about every business in Sam’s town, so he’d better be,” Phil retorts, and Nick laughs as his friend shakes his head at him. “At this point, the only real roadblock is that Tony keeps complaining that we’re stealing his ‘wedding month.’”

“He knows that’s not a real thing, right?”

“I don’t think so.” 

He delivers with such perfect, precise dryness that Nick knocks his knee into the guy’s leg to break his bland expression. Phil’s a little like Melinda—he’s not a grinner, necessarily, but when he really breaks into a big smile, he wears it on his whole face—and the laughter crinkles all the lines around his eyes. Nick’s watched those lines grow over the last year or so, since Phil met and fell head-over-heels in love with Barton, and he’s enjoyed every second of it.

He also shrugs as he leans back against the bench. “I’m surprised Stark’s even got the time to needle you, what with everything that’s on his plate right now.”

Phil snorts at him. “Stark _never_ has enough on his plate,” he replies, and funnily enough, Nick can’t really counter that one. The chain link fence around the ball court rattles all of a sudden, distracting the hell out of him, and he glances over to catch Beth waving happily at him. He waves back, and right before his eyes, she skates backward a good three feet. It’s a new trick, and if the grin on her face is any indication, she’s damn proud of it.

He offers her a grin of his own, and a quick thumbs up.

“Speaking of Stark, you could try talking to him,” Phil suggests, and Nick realizes once he’s twisted to look at him that the guy’s spent the last couple seconds watching the exchange between him and his eight-year-old. When he raises an eyebrow, Phil shrugs. “He’s had run-ins with plenty of unsavory news programs, _Suffolk County: Unmasked_ included. I’m pretty sure the only reason they’re paying Bruce and Miles any sort of ‘respectful distance’ is because he’s threatened to sue them into the next century.”

The idea sounds so out-of-this-world ridiculous that Nick almost busts out laughing. But Phil holds his gaze, face as serious and steady as when he’s in a courtroom, so Nick just shakes his head. “The day I voluntarily share my personal business with Stark is a cold, cold day in hell, Phil.”

“And if this turns out the way you think it will,” Phil replies, “that day might be tomorrow.”

The words hit the air the way a match hits gasoline, flaring so bright that Nick worries for a second that they’ve sucked all the oxygen out of the space around him, but Phil just goes back to watching the ball game on the basketball courts. Two more of the neighborhood boys have joined Jackson on the asphalt, and they actively jeer the kid who’s trying to replicate Alex’s last shot. Nick watches, too, studying their young faces and their unbroken joy, and he misses his own lazy adolescence, when fall stretched on forever and nobody ever called him in before sundown.

He feels like he lived for years in that last hour before the sun set, and like he’s still waiting for dawn to sneak back over the horizon.

After long enough, Phil folds his hands in his lap and stares down at his thumbs. “You’re operating under an assumption that this will be the worst-case scenario,” he reminds Nick quietly, his head shaking a little idly. “What happened in Washington County, at the A.G.’s office, at the trial— You don’t know it’ll be about that, or that it’ll be about Melinda.”

Something tight and thick tickles the back of Nick’s throat, and he swallows hard around it. “You know that feeling in the air right before the sky opens up and it rains down all over your ass?” he asks.

Phil tosses him a sideways glance. “Yes.”

“That’s how I know this is about Melinda: I can feel it like before a rain.”

 

==

 

“And after the break,” the newscaster says, her perfect blonde hair cascading around her shoulders like something out of a L’Oreal commercial, “Trish Tilby joins us for her special report on Nick Fury: District Attorney of Lies. We’ll be right back.”

Melinda stands in the bedroom doorway as the program cuts to commercial, watching as Nick’s shoulders slowly start to unclench. One of the Charmin bear cubs bounces around on the screen, excitedly babbling about his animated toilet tissue until Nick mutes the sound. The room plunges into the kind of silence Melinda expects at midnight instead of in the early evening—heavy, tense, unyielding—and she quietly closes the door behind her.

Nick glances in her direction. “Lemme guess: kids promised to watch a movie, but you know they flipped over the second you left them in the basement.”

“Alex swears he’ll sit on Jack before he lets him change the channel, but I know he’s worried.” She crosses the room slowly, every step a thousand times heavier than the one before, and lowers herself onto the end of the bed at his side. Their shoulders brush lightly and their knees settle together. They’ve sat the same way hundred times—when they first moved into the house, when Melinda found out she was pregnant the second time, when Barton’s sticky juvenile record threw the whole district attorney’s office into chaos—but this time, it feels heavier. Melinda can almost taste the tension, metallic and unfamiliar on the back of her tongue. She swallows around it before she glances over at her husband.

“Skye says she’s not involved, and I believe her,” she says after another second, and Nick nods dully as he stares at the TV. She’s sitting in the shadow of his covered, ruined eye, the one place where she can’t read his expression. “Nick.”

“I heard you.”

“I know you heard me, I want you to _look_ at me.” He sighs before he twists in her direction. The expression he keeps so closed-off to everyone outside their home—his colleagues at work, their neighbors, even their _friends_ —softens when she meets his gaze, and the mask melts away when she touches his face. He bares his worry to her, and her stomach clenches. “This isn’t anybody we care about,” she says, the words hitching slightly. “This is somebody else, somebody who wants one or both of us ruined, somebody—”

“The list of somebodies who can do those things is pretty short, Mel,” he interrupts, his voice hardly above a whisper.

“But it’s not a blank page,” she reminds him—and then, the _Suffolk County: Unmasked_ logo flashes on the screen, and Nick looks away to unmute the TV.

Trish Tilby is a tall, dark-haired woman in her middle thirties in a crisp business suit, her smile fake and strained as she stares into the camera. There’s something unpolished and uncomfortable in the tight way she holds her body and the funny way she twists when the blonde newscaster hands the show off to her. She clears her throat, sips from her _SC: U_ coffee mug, wets her lips, and clears her throat again.

“They really called in the big guns for this,” Melinda mutters, and the corner of Nick’s mouth kicks up into a tiny smile.

Tilby draws in a breath. “Many residents of Suffolk County are aware of Nick Fury, the tough-on-crime district attorney now in his fourth term,” she begins, and the newscast suddenly jump-cuts to a shot of Nick from a press conference years ago. It’s the same footage as that morning, a clip that shows off just how patchy almost-gray his hair’d gone before he started shaving his head, and Melinda almost rolls her eyes. “Every election cycle, he tells us the same thing: that the election’s not about him, it’s about the people of Suffolk County. He fed us this lie thirteen years ago, and we’re still believing it.”

The press conference clip shudders and, after a flash of black, it’s replaced with a grainy clip from Nick’s first campaign more than a decade ago. He’s dressed his favorite black suit, his legs crossed as he leans back in an uncomfortable wooden chair and shakes his head. “I don’t need to talk about my personal life,” he explains to the reporter, his shoulders lifting into a loose shrug. “What I do out of the office isn’t anybody’s concern but my own. We spend so much time in this state—in this _country_ —caring about what our candidates ate for breakfast that we forget to care about what their plans are. Ask me about how I plan on improving the conviction rate for domestic violence cases, not about whether I’m seeing anyone.”

Six months after that interview, after Nick’d won the election and settled into work, they’d flown to Boston for a long weekend and married at a courthouse there, just the two of them, giddy like kids half their age.

Her stomach twists as the screen leaps back to Tilby. “But sources familiar with Nick Fury—sources who have known the man for much longer than the innocent taxpayers of our county—reveal that he’s kept his ultra-private personal life that way for a reason, and that reason is former Assistant Attorney General Melinda May.”

The image on the screen jumps again, this time to the picture of Melinda that once appeared on the Attorney General’s website, her collar stiff with starch and her stick-straight hair hanging just above her shoulders. She’s grinning like a fool, young and excited about her first job out of law school. It’s a far cry from the reflection Melinda stares at in her mirror every day, and she drops her eyes to the floor for a second.

“She’s cute,” Nick murmurs, and she elbows him hard enough in the side that he forces out a laugh.

“But Melinda May is no ordinary attorney,” Tilby continues, and Melinda draws in a breath before she glances back at the television screen. The image’s changed again, this time to a clip featuring a press-packed courtroom hallway. Flashbulbs act almost like strobe lights, tossing everything into slow-motion, and only when the footage pauses and fades to sepia hues does Melinda recognize her own face in the crowd, her mouth open as she delivers a statement into a microphone. “For the last four years of her time with the attorney general, May prosecuted some of our state’s most heinous cases. Rapists, murderers, kidnappers, drug kingpins—they could all count on Melinda May to sweep in and throw them in jail.”

The sepia hues shift suddenly to grayscale, and a badly-animated white box flies in and frames Melinda’s face. Her shoulders tense.

“Until,” Tilby says, her voice even for the first time all broadcast, “the Ramsey murders.

“If you’ve lived in our state for long, you might remember the Ramsey murders,” Tilby continues, the narration carrying over hastily spliced-together news footage of a house cordoned off by crime scene tape and detectives silently answering press questions. “Two middle-aged women, raped and murdered in a small town in Washington County. The local authorities suspected—and arrested—their neighbor, Anthony Prescott.” The screen flashes over to Prescott’s mugshot, his slack face almost ghostly in the black-and-white still. “The district attorney, Nathaniel Essex, promised us there was enough evidence to bring Prescott to justice. He even invited in the attorney general’s office—in the form of Melinda May—to help prosecute the case.”

The footage cuts back to Tilby. She’s staring into the wrong camera for the first second or two of the transition, but she quickly swivels around in her chair. Her dark eyes narrow like she’s peering specifically at Melinda, and Melinda casts her eyes up at the clock above the dresser, like she really cares about the time. “Before we knew it—we, the taxpayers of this state,” Tilby presses, and Melinda tries hard not to snort at the repetition of the word _taxpayer_ , “the case against Prescott was dismissed among allegations of concealed and destroyed evidence. And although most of the disciplinary proceedings stemming from those accusations were sealed from the press, I am prepared to tell you today that both Essex _and_ May were brought before the disciplinary administrator for their actions.”

She delivers the line like a one-two blow to the stomach and Melinda’s immediately on her feet in response, her hands fluttering helplessly in the air before they clench into fists at her side. She walks a tiny loop around the floor, listening to Tilby’s voice drone on—reading the list of allegations, Melinda realizes, along with the citation to all the rules of professional conduct named in the initial complaint. She twists back to the screen as the description of the attorney’s duty of candor before a tribunal flashes up, and for one split second, she wants to scream.

“Mel,” Nick says quietly. He puts a hand on the back of her elbow, steady and warm, and she glances down at him. He meets her gaze evenly, his eye carefully unblinking, and she sits back down on the bed.

Her hands tighten into fists in her lap. Nick presses his palm to the small of her back, the barest human comfort, and she tries to breathe around the rage that’s climbing up her throat.

The camera flashes back to Tilby, her hands folded carefully atop the news desk, her lips curved into a small, almost rueful smile. “Sources close to former district attorney Essex, a man who has spent the last decade teaching at a law school in South Carolina,” she continues, and Melinda almost laughs at the thought of that man molding new lawyers, “report for the first time that Melinda May—unlike Mister Essex—left the proceedings with her license intact. But why, I wonder?”

The screen darkens to an office with the shades drawn. Someone—a woman, judging from the shape of her silhouette in the near-black—shakes her head, her face shadowed both by the closed blinds and shoddy camera work. “May turned against Essex,” she explains, and Melinda realizes immediately that the camera work isn’t shoddy, but purposely dark, a poor man’s attempt to hide the speaker’s identity from the viewer. “She blamed what happened, all the messed-up evidence, on him. She testified against him at his disciplinary hearing, got other people in his office to do it too. There’s no way she didn’t know what was happening, but she waited until her job was on the line to say anything—and threw him under the bus like a coward.”

“That isn’t—” Melinda starts to grind out, but Nick’s thumb sweeps across her spine, and she deflates like a popped balloon. The words rush out as a sigh, and she shakes her head.

“Yeah, May had to be dirty,” says someone else, a man in the same shadowed chair as the woman. He gestures with large, meaty hands, his sausage-fingers spread wide. “There’s no way somebody works that close to Essex for that long and misses all the signs. Not—” He punctuates his point by jabbing the air with an enormous index finger. “—unless she was in on it and just saw the opportunity for somebody to take the fall.”

“That’s _not_ what happened,” Melinda growls, louder this time, and when Nick’s thumb drifts across her lower back again, she shrugs him off. Her fingernails bite into the heels of her hands as she stares at the television screen.

The shadowy strangers blink away and the scene cuts back to Tilby. The woman sets down her coffee mug, maybe just for _Nancy Grace_ -style dramatic event, and stares back into the camera lens. “No one knows what really happened in the hallways of the Washington County District Attorney’s office—and no one knows who was really responsible for the so-called tampered evidence that allowed a murderer like Prescott to walk free. What we do know is this: Melinda May, disgraced and dishonored, got to keep her law license—and now, she works in the Suffolk County Judicial Complex as a research attorney for the county’s complex litigation judges.”

Tilby’s face is replaced again, this time by a photograph, and Melinda freezes as though someone’s just submerged her in an ice bath. It’s a crooked, hastily-framed snapshot, the type most people capture on their cell phones, and it shows Melinda walking up the back stairs into the judicial complex just a few steps behind Nick. She remembers the day vividly, almost as though it’s her own photograph: her car’d broken down over the weekend, so Nick had doubled back to pick her up once the kids headed off to school. They’d broken their rules about professional distance that day, rolling down the windows against the summer heat and laughing about some awful song on the radio. She’s smiling in the picture, glancing over her shoulder, coy as a woman in a fashion shoot.

Her heart drops into her stomach, and she swears her whole body churns.

“This,” Tilby stresses as the camera flashes back to the studio, her dark, glaring eyes staring straight out at the camera, “is the kind of woman our district attorney is married to. The kind of woman he’s hidden from us, the taxpayers, the people who _trusted_ him. A woman who lies, a woman with disciplinary complaints against her, a woman who works in the same building beside the judges he appears before, a woman—”

And that’s precisely when Melinda walks right out of the bedroom.

She walks away from Trish Tilby, her even tenor voice trailing Melinda down the stairs like a cloud of uninvited smoke, and away from her hateful, borderline misogynistic rant about what kind of woman she _thinks_ Melinda might be. She walks until she’s in the front hallway, pauses to shove her flip-flops onto her feet, and then she walks out into their front yard, where the slowly-setting October sun tosses the last rays of orange light over Jackson’s skateboard and Beth’s sidewalk chalk family portrait. The grass tickles her feet as she stands there, the evening chill seeping into her skin, and stares up at the blood-red sun and the darkening sky.

It’s full minutes before she hears the front door shut behind her, or the measured footsteps of another person joining her in the grass. She closes her eyes against the dying sun and the lazy breeze.

“So much for best-case scenarios,” she says after another few seconds.

Just behind her, close enough that she can almost feel the heat radiating off him, Nick snorts. “Phil texted you about our conversation?” 

“He wanted to warn me about your cynicism,” she replies. “I think he’s started wearing rose-colored glasses.”

“I’ve heard falling in love can do that to a guy,” Nick returns, and when she casts a glance over her shoulder, he smiles softly at her. It’s a private smile, one reserved for the rare moments when they’re absolutely alone, and she feels the tension slowly unfold, like an origami creature coming undone. Her shoulders loosen, her muscles unknot, and somewhere in all the chaos brewing in her mind and belly, Nick’s hand finds the small of her back again.

She remembers standing to testify at the disciplinary hearing all those years ago and the half-second brush of Nick’s fingers against her spine before she crossed the room to the witness stand. She sometimes wonders if she fell in love with him that day, and during the weeks and months after.

“Essex must have talked to someone,” she says after silence has swept over their yard and the rest of their quiet street. When she casts a glance over at Nick, his fingers still against her shirt. “He must have planned this, crawled out of the woodwork to share his side of the story, wanted to make you look like—”

“You don’t need to worry about me,” Nick cuts in, and she purses her lips into a tight line. He tries to maintain his smile, to hold it steady, but it slowly slips away, the warmth drifting from his eyes. “I can handle whatever the press and my team wants to throw at me. My question is how _you_ plan on dealing with this.”

She snorts softly and rolls her eyes, but her stomach twists to remind her that her husband’s still staring at her, reading her every expression with the ease of his favorite book. She glances away from him, back out toward the perfectly-painted houses across the street. Everyone’s lights are on, the dim golden glow fighting against the growing night.

She wonders how many of those lights are actually televisions, playing out the end credits of _Suffolk County: Unmasked_.

“I’ll be fine,” she tells Nick, but her voice wavers. When she looks back over his shoulder, he raises an eyebrow. “I’m not fine right now,” she admits, “but I will be.”

He rolls his lips together before he asks, “You sure about that?” 

She shrugs. “What choice do I have?” she replies, and for once, her genius husband lacks an answer.

 

==

 

Phil’s waiting for Nick just inside the secure door that leads up from the back stairwell when Nick shows up to work, armed with a steaming mug of fresh-brewed coffee. Nick narrows his eye at him, and he shrugs. “We got here early,” he says, offering up the mug. “In case it got bad.”

“It’s already bad,” Nick replies, and Phil purses his lips as he falls into step down the hallway. 

Since the beginning of time—or at least, the beginning of his legal career—Nick’s always preferred those first quiet hours of work to any other time during the day. They’re like his own private witching hour, filling him up with the kind of energy that hits night owls after ten, and he fucking basks in it. Even as a fresh-faced kid at the attorney general’s office, he’d show up an hour earlier than the rest of the office and hunker down in his cube, churning out memos before most the other worker-drones even rolled out of bed. He still remembers the first day Melinda staggered into work, fifteen minutes late and her hair a mess, muttering about the assorted evils of the early morning.

He’d been out of the cubicles and into an actual shoebox office by then, but he’d stood in his doorway and watched her rush down the hallway into the conference room.

More than twenty years later, and the woman still hates mornings.

Of course, this morning’s a morning to hate, so full of amateur dramatics that Nick’d almost ran down some reporters as he backed out of the driveway. He’d walked out to grab the newspaper in nothing more than his boxers and his robe and found three of them camped out in a white news van, swapping McDonalds breakfast sandwiches and chatting about the weather. He’d stared them down across the yard ‘til one of them’d wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

“You up for an interview?” he’d asked. He’d looked about Odinson’s age, with thick blond hair and an ironic flannel shirt.

Nick’d rolled his eye. “What do you think?” he’d replied, and slammed the front door hard behind him.

By the time Melinda and the kids had all rolled out of bed, bleary-eyed and unready for another Monday, the three news guys’d called all their news buddies over, adding an extra van and Peter Parker’s beat up burgundy clunker. Parker’d actually walked halfway up the front yard before Nick, standing in the front window, managed to catch the kid’s eyes and shake his head. He’d retreated back to his car about as fast as his skinny spindle legs could carry him.

Beth, clueless, had pressed her nose up to the glass. “Is this because Mama was on the news?” she’d asked, the question fogging up the window.

“Something like that,” he’d replied, and he’d steered her away from the front room before pulling the curtains shut.

He’d left them that way, the same way he leaves his blinds alone when he steps into his office. Barton’s hovering at his assistant’s desk, playing with the novelty snow globe he brought back from the Mall of America. Phil shoots the guy a look, and he shakes the globe up one more time before setting it down. “Good news is that there’s no press around the building yet,” he reports, trailing them into Nick’s office. Nick tosses Phil a glance, and Phil shrugs noncommittally. “I sent a text out to everybody but Stark, warned them to be on the lookout.”

Nick leans against his desk and crosses his arms over his chest. “Stark’s the one the media loves to poke with a stick,” he points out.

“Yeah, and Bruce’ll keep him from running his mouth,” Barton counters. He rests his hands on his hips. “Darcy said she’ll see if Peter’ll tell her what the _Bugle_ ’s up to—”

“You mean once he’s finished lurking outside my goddamn house?” Nick interrupts.

Barton clenches his jaw like he’s really tempted to roll his eyes. “—and I warned security that today might be kind of a nightmare.” He glances away for a second, and Nick knows without looking that he and Phil are jumping head-first into one of their silent conversations. He sips his coffee while Barton tilts his head like a bird and frowns. “Phil thinks somebody should tell the rest of the judicial complex what’s going on,” he says after a couple seconds. “Keep rogue reporters from pinning down some member of the janitorial staff and asking about you.”

Nick turns to glare at Phil, and the guy immediately raises his hands in surrender. “I was just explaining the situation in the car,” he defends, “and Clint seemed to think—”

“Hey, no blaming it on me when you’ve kept this locked up tighter than Fort Knox for a year, boss,” Barton cuts in.

“—that I’m overreacting on your behalf.” Nick’s frown tightens, his jaw setting into an almost-uncomfortable line as Phil slowly lowers his hands. “And as somebody who worked at the ethics commission when this all happened, I think a little overreaction’s a good idea.”

This time, Barton actually rolls his damn eyes. “The only people who remember the Ramsey case are scared old ladies and people who live up in Washington County,” he says, shaking his head. “Hell, I hardly remember it, and I was up to my eyebrows in criminal justice classes.”

“And working two jobs,” Phil points out.

“And apparently about to jump into some kind of domestic while there are still reporters camped out around my mailbox,” Nick breaks in, and Barton shuts his mouth midway through his bitchy, bickering comeback. Nick sighs and sets his mug back on his desk. “I appreciate you both acting as my response team for all this,” he says after another couple seconds, “but I don’t think we need to give this story any more free publicity than it’s already got.” Phil’s face folds into a frown, but he nods in grudging agreement. “Once everybody’s here, I’ll call a staff meeting, let them know what’s going on. I’m sure Melinda’ll do the same with her own team. We’ll cross the rest of the bridges when we hit them.”

“According to Phil, somebody’s gonna light them on fire and toss the extinguisher to the other side before we get there,” Barton comments. It’s mostly out the side of his mouth, but it’s delivered with the same kind of subtlety as when Nick’s eight-year-old tries to keep a secret, and Phil’s lips quirk into a smile even as he narrows his eyes. Nick just chuckles. “Anyway, you guys turn this into your war room or whatever, I’m getting coffee,” he tags on, almost as though nobody bothered laughing at his joke. “Belated congrats on the marriage and kids, sir, I’m happy for you.”

A smirk climbs across Barton’s face like some kind of shit-eating ivy, and Nick rolls his eyes. “I thought I told you stop calling me ‘sir,’” he snipes, and Barton’s whole damn face twinkles with mirth as he retreats back to his own damn office and shuts Nick’s door behind him.

Nick glances over at Phil. “Wouldn’t be your best man if you paid me,” he decides.

The guy grins at him. “There’s a reason I didn’t ask,” he replies evenly, and Nick rolls his eye even as he snorts a laugh.

Phil heads out a couple minutes later, muttering about preparing his Monday docket and grabbing another cup of coffee before everybody else descends on the office, and Nick waves him off. He stands at the window as he finishes off the dregs in his own mug, watching the mostly-naked trees wave their skeleton fingers in the wind. Melinda’s probably herding the kids out of the house right now, he thinks, dodging bored reporters on their way to the car. 

He wishes he’d insisted on taking them, instead of letting her shrug his hand off her shoulder as she stormed around the house.

Then again, he wishes a whole damn lot of things.

He’s sitting at his desk all of ten minutes later when the door to his office flies open hard enough that it bangs against the outer wall. “Are you fucking kidding me?” a voice demands, and Nick looks up from his overflowing Outlook inbox as Maria Hill storms across his office. He raises an eyebrow when the door slams hard behind her, but she ignores it. “Is what that—that smut-peddling harpy said _true_? Are you actually married to a woman who might as well be a hypothetical question in an ethics textbook?”

All Nick’s paper-thin good humor flies out the window at the sharpness in her tone, and the second he catches her eyes, he knows she realizes it, too. Her lips snap shut as he grits his teeth; his jaw hurts from tightening it, but still not as much as that soft spot in the middle of his chest. Maria rolls her lips together, her hands falling from her hips, and she swallows. “Sir—”

“I’m calling a staff meeting once Stark and Banner roll in,” he cuts her off, and she snaps her mouth shut. “Let everybody else know that I want them in the staff room before the Prius pulls into the lot.”

She nods, just one little head jerk, and then draws in a breath. “Sir, what I meant—”

“You’ll get to hear all about my ethics-hypo wife at the meeting, Hill,” he snaps. “Now go.”

The door slams again behind her, not much lighter than before, and Nick sighs as he leans back in his chair. It’s hardly past eight in the morning and there’s already a dull ache behind his eye sockets, the kind that promises he’ll be threatening interns and file clerks before the day’s finished. He rubs his too-tight forehead for a couple seconds, then swivels back to his e-mail. 

He deletes at least fifty messages from strangers who want to comment on Tilby’s report. _Pull my e-mail address off the website until further notice_ , he e-mails to Skye down in IT, and he makes sure to lock his screen before he’s forced to read through one of her eighty-word answers.

He’s just flipped open his first file of the day when Barton pokes his head in the doorway. “Stark and Bruce just showed up,” he says, and ducks out again before Nick can respond.

Nick nods to the empty space in front of him. He’s an attorney, a man of a hundred masks, but for a second, he struggles to draw in a deep breath. He doesn’t give two shits about what Trish Tilby or Darcy Lewis’s nosy boyfriend think of him—or about the shadowy half-truths they pass off as actual news.

But he worries about what these people, this band of extraordinary idiots he assembled into a team, think of him. And he worries, maybe too much, about losing their trust.

He tugs on his suit coat and heads out to the conference room.

Pepper Potts holds the door open for him as he walks in, Stark’s portfolio under her arm, and when she clears her throat, the whole room drops into dead silence. Stark freezes midway through some emphatic gesture with his coffee mug, Barton stops doodling something on the corner of his napkin, Odinson lets a Danish dangle from between his teeth until Jane elbows him. He coughs a little and starts chewing again, but Nick—

In the last thirteen years, he’s run hundreds—maybe thousands—of staff meetings. He’s never felt this nauseous before.

“I called the interns in, too,” Potts says. She stands at his shoulder, close enough that their arms almost brush. Nick wonders for a second how many texts she’s exchanged with Phil in the last twelve hours. “I can get rid of them if—”

“Interns are fine,” he tells her. When he glances over, she smiles softly. He thinks she touches his elbow before she sits down between Hill and Romanoff, but he’s not sure.

Across the room from him, Phil nods briefly.

Nick swallows. 

“Since I’m sure most of you already heard some of this, I’ll make this quick,” he begins, and he swears the room instantly feels smaller, like the tension’s swept into all the empty spaces around them. “Last night, there was a _Suffolk County: Unmasked_ report that claimed to be about me but was actually focused on Melinda May. May and I both worked as special prosecutors at the attorney general’s office in the nineties, and—”

“You got married?” Stark cuts in. He leans a couple degrees back in his chair, hands raised, and Banner’s face creases like he’s considering stabbing the guy in the neck with his pen and then running off with the insurance money. “Sorry, it’s just that you’re equivocating and some of us have very big boxes of transcripts to paw through. I thought I’d try to save some time.”

Nick presses his lips together, hard, and waits for Stark to lower his hands back down into his lap. “Yes,” he answers after a second or two, “we got married and continue to _be_ married, all of which happened after we left the attorney general’s office. Nothing that happened between May and I before or after we moved here affected my work, none of it affects this office, and, as far as I’m concerned, nothing that popped up on the news last night should change what we do here or how we do it.”

“Except for the fact that you lied,” Rogers immediately says, and almost every head in the room swivels to stare at him. He’s staring at his hands, his head bowed and his jaw tight, and even at the head of the table, Nick can feel his disapproval like a tidal wave. “I believe that none of it changes what we do here,” he continues after a second, “but we all have a responsibility to be honest. Not just to the court, though that’s the big one, but to other attorneys.” He raises his chin enough to meet Nick’s gaze. “And you lied. To the voters, to the courts, and to us.”

There’s enough hurt in the back of his voice that Barnes shifts over to knock their elbows together. Usually, Nick’d smile a little at that—they’re equals, the two of them, a united front against pretty much everything in a way Nick and Melinda are still trying to perfect all these years later—but today, he just shakes his head. “I omitted certain information from the press and most of this staff, yes,” he admits, “but I never lied. I told the people who needed to know—Chief Judge Hammersmith, the election committee, some people in this office—”

Stark snorts. “Now we officially know who Daddy likes best,” he grumbles, and then swears when Banner kicks him under the table.

Nick tries forcing a smile, some show of camaraderie to his still-staring staff, but his face twitches like those muscles have atrophied. He ends up just shrugging lightly. “I never shouted my personal life from the rooftops,” he finishes, “but I never lied.” 

“Because you needed to protect your job?” Romanoff asks quietly. 

“No,” he answers, “because I needed to protect my wife.” When he glances over at Romanoff, she tilts her head a half-degree in something like approval, and for some reason, that bolsters him into drawing in a deep breath. He lets his attention drift around the room for a minute, indexing all the familiar faces he’s worked with for the last year—or two, or four, or twelve—before he exhales. “Here’s the truth for all of you,” he says, and for the first time all morning, his voice feels as firm as it sounds. “I am married to a former colleague of mine who works in this building. She was brought up on disciplinary charges years ago in connection to the Ramsey murders up in Washington County, and all the charges were dismissed.” He shakes his head. “All the rest of it, the bullshit that popped up on TV last night and in the paper this morning, that’s irrelevant.”

“Unless she did the things she was accused of,” Banner comments, his voice soft but still filled with his usual barely restrained force. He shrugs slightly, his palms pressed to his coffee mug even as he meets Nick’s gaze. “That kind of scandal, it casts a shadow.”

“And I wouldn’t marry a woman who did so much as half those things. Period.” Banner nods at that before he returns to his coffee, and the last kinks of tension finally uncoil from deep inside Nick’s gut. “If anything else you all need to know comes up, I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, stay away from the press—and from anybody else who might want to turn this into a three-ring circus. Otherwise, we’re done here.”

Stark grunts some crack about Laufeyson and circus clowns that cracks Barnes up, Odinson glares at both of them like they’ve just told a whole litany of dead baby jokes, and the staff starts shuffling out of the room one-by-one. Phil offers him one brief, supportive smile before he rushes off to his Monday morning docket, Peggy Carter stops to warn him about a couple documents she’s bringing over for him to review, and Rogers pauses at the door to nod respectfully before he finally steps out into the hallway. 

Hill lingers until the room’s almost empty, her fingertips skimming along the top of the table. “Sir, what I said about your wife, I didn’t—”

“I know,” he interrupts. She snaps her head up, and Nick forces himself into a tight, tiny smile as he meets her gaze. “If Phil’s my good eye, you’re my right hand. I probably should’ve warned you about all this.”

“And I should probably stop letting your secrets surprise me,” she replies with a shrug, but Nick catches the mischievous glint in her eye the second before she turns on her heel and walks out of the room.

 

==

 

“You know, for someone who’s stopped litigating, you’re very demanding,” Abigail Brand comments as she drapes her arm over the back of her chair.

Melinda rests her fists on her hips. “And for someone who tears down other attorneys for a living, you’re certainly smug,” she retorts, and she watches as Brand’s smile drops right off her face.

The state’s disciplinary administrator keeps two offices, one in the Supreme Court building all the way up in the capital, and one here in the Franklin County courthouse. In fact, the disciplinary committee, the board of bar examiners, and the state ethics commission together constitute an entire floor of the Supreme Court building, with well-lit modern offices and an excellent view of the federal courthouse. Brand alone can boast about her state-of-the-art hearing room, a team of six direct subordinates who handle her bidding, and an enormous window office.

Franklin County is a different story entirely.

Oh, the courthouse itself is a massive, beautiful, old limestone building with stained glass in the stairwells and mosaic tiles on the floor, but Brand’s office is as claustrophobic as a broom closet even though it’s three times the size. A half-dead plant curls up in the corner of a dingy, unwashed window; the walls beside and behind Brand’s desk are lined entirely in six-foot tall vertical file cabinets, all of them labeled meticulously. Attorney discipline may be meted out in the Supreme Court building in the capital or in any of the various hearing rooms dotted across the state, but Melinda knows that this is the real, beating heart of the disciplinary committee: the repository of old disciplinary files, shoved into empty rooms at the far end of the state and forgotten until they can be destroyed.

Brand shifts forward in her chair until she can fold her hands atop her desk. “I’m supposed to be in hearings all week, you know,” she explains curtly as Melinda lowers herself into the empty chair across from her. “Three in your county, two in Clarion, another eight in Carroll—and none down here in the repository.”

Melinda shrugs as she crosses her legs. “I called your assistant.”

“And she told you I’d be here?”

“No, she told me that your hearings in our building didn’t start until three this afternoon. I made an educated guess.” She nods to the stack of files teetering on the edge of Brand’s desk. “You don’t let anyone else shred the old files.”

Brand rolls her eyes. “I hate that you’re friends with Phil Coulson.”

“And I hate my personal life being broadcast on local access television, so we’re about even.” The other woman holds her expression perfectly even, not a blink or a flinch for her trouble, and Melinda feels the line of her shoulders soften. “You heard,” she guesses.

“At this point, everyone from Denver to Kansas City’s heard,” Brand retorts, shaking her head. Her long ponytail of dark hair—hair she died bright green during law school—sweeps against her back. “To be fair, you made it a good twelve years. I think Summers’s the only person left our office pool.”

Melinda raises an eyebrow. “What’d he bet?”

“That it’d never come out.” Brand shrugs and leans back in her chair again. “He’s young,” she comments, waving her hand. “Still believes in the power of love. I give him another year before his wife cheats and he’s trolling for free sex on Craigslist.”

She reaches for the bottle of water on her desk while Melinda leans forward, her hands resting on her thighs. “I need to know why this came out,” she says, and Brand pauses with her water halfway to her mouth. Their eyes meet, and the other woman purses her lips. “I know it’s not an accident or coincidence. The information on the broadcast, the picture of Nick and me at work— None of it’s the kind of thing that somebody stumbles on. It’s purposeful.”

Brand sets the bottle back down. “And you think I can help?”

“You’re the disciplinary administrator. Your whole job is preventing this kind of information from coming out accidentally—or on purpose.” Brand nods, but her thumb picks at the paper label on her bottle. Melinda narrows her eyes. “And I’m pretty sure you already know what’s going on.”

Brand’s thumb freezes, the nail lodged under the label like she’s about to tear it all off, and her throat bobs slightly as she swallows. She shifts her weight to the front of her chair and folds her hands again. “You know that’s confidential information, Melinda.”

“For a normal person, yes,” Melinda responds immediately, “but in this case—”

“There’s no ‘in this case,’” Brand cuts her off, and Melinda feels her jaw tighten uncomfortably. Brand sighs, shaking her head. “I appreciate everything you did for me during the Essex case,” she says after a few seconds, “but no matter how indebted I am to you, open disciplinary cases are restricted to the attorneys handling the case. You know that.”

Melinda swallows around the thick feeling in the back of her throat. “I put my job on the line to help you prosecute him,” she says, struggling to keep her voice even. Every word sparks, like flint and steel held over kindling. “I testified against him, they forced me out of my _job_ , I—”

“And as I’ve said a hundred times,” Brand interrupts, her words tight and clipped, “I’m very grateful.”

“And right now, your gratitude isn’t good enough!” Melinda snaps back. Suddenly claustrophobic in the tiny office, she pushes to her feet and paces from one cabinet-lined wall to the other. “Do you understand what is happening, right now?” she asks, twisting to stare at Brand and watching as the other woman raises her eyebrows. “My house is crawling with reporters. My kids don’t want to go to school because they don’t understand what’s going on. My husband’s staff might be on the brink of mutiny, for all I know. And you—the _one_ person who should understand how serious this all is—is only offering me ‘gratitude.’”

“Because that’s all I can offer you, Melinda,” Brand retorts. She pushes away from her desk and leans back in her chair like a royal holding court, her legs crossed at the knee. “I can’t ‘wink-wink, nudge-nudge’ my way through this particular minefield, not with the way I’m being watched.”

“Says the highest authority in attorney discipline short of the Supreme Court.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” Brand raises her hands almost in defense, and Melinda narrows her eyes. “I know you, and I trust you,” she presses, “but I also can’t trust other people right now. Not when confidential information is suddenly a hot commodity.” She catches Melinda’s gaze and holds it, unblinking. Melinda purses her lips. “You remember what it was like, don’t you? Special investigators, meetings that would’ve made Deep Throat blush, half the disciplinary committee recusing themselves because they knew Essex from when he worked at the statehouse? That’s how Coulson landed on your review board, how he ended up buddies with you and your husband.” She shakes her head. “You have a district attorney accused of half the shit Essex pulled, it’s a nightmare. You add in the fact that he used to be a senator? That he wanted to make a run at attorney general? We’re lucky he didn’t just burn the capital down and start from scratch.”

She reaches for her water bottle as the room falls into silence, Melinda watching as she swallows. “This isn’t the Essex case,” she points out. “The smoke and mirrors ended the second that bastard lost his law license.”

Brand shrugs lightly. “Doesn’t mean we can’t pull them back out if we need them.”

“Why the hell would you still need them?” Melinda demands. Brand quirks her head slightly to one side, and Melinda throws up her hands. “There’s no open disciplinary case, just someone dragging up the past to—” 

Brand raises her eyebrows again, a curious parakeet expression crossing her face, and Melinda freezes with her hands still hovering in the air. They stare at one another in the pin-drop silence. When Melinda finally drops her hands to the back of her chair, her fingers curl into fists. “He’s moved for reinstatement, hasn’t he?” she asks, her own voice sounding foreign and distant. “Whatever he’s spent the last twelve years doing, it’s not enough, and now he wants his law license back.”

Across the tiny office, Brand’s chin dips and then lifts again, the whispering echo of a nod. “Open disciplinary cases are confidential,” she reminds Melinda, but she never breaks eye contact. “I couldn’t possibly comment.”

Melinda snorts lightly and rolls her eyes. “You really are smug.”

“What were you expecting from the highest disciplinary authority short of the Supreme Court?” Brand retorts, and Melinda allows herself one very brief smile.

 

==

 

“If you don’t comment on at least some of these reports,” says Christine Everhart, “you’re committing career suicide.”

“And if I do comment on them, I’m the guy who ragged on his wife while the whole state watched,” Nick retorts, and Everhart clenches her jaw.

Depending on who in Suffolk County government you talk to, Christine Everhart is either a breath of fresh air or the devil incarnate. She’s a tall, serious-faced blonde, the kind of woman who sips her coffee like she’s in the middle of a wake and never blinks away from Nick. He stands with his back to the window and feels immediately like he’s under a magnifying glass.

Everhart, on the other hand, sighs and sets her coffee cup down on the table in his office. “If you focus on the disciplinary charges, absolutely, you’ll come across as ragging on your wife,” she admits, and Nick snorts as he shakes his head. “But there’s a whole continuum of statements available to you. We can even avoid the content of the report altogether.”

“Then what do we talk about in its place?”

“The emotional impact.” He rolls his eye, and Everhart’s whole expression tightens. “Nick, we can’t ignore this, and the longer you stay silent, the longer the press plays with it. The _Bugle_ already grabbed the story and ran with it, along with two local news stations. If it hits a bigger media market—Denver, Omaha, Kansas City—you’re looking at a national broadcast picking it up as filler, and that—”

“I am not giving Tilby and that _joke_ of a program even one iota of credit,” Nick breaks in, and Everhart snaps her lips shut. She rolls them together, her eyes burning dark as she glares at him, and he shakes his head. “If I make a statement without commenting on the allegations, then I’m hiding something. And if I comment, I’m a disloyal husband.”

“Or you’re the guy who defended his wife while the whole state watched,” Stark volunteers. Nick glances over at him, and he immediately raises his hands. In the chair next to Everhart, Phil rolls his eyes. “I take it on good authority that you can engage the press while still being a supportive and appropriate partner. Or at least, that’s what Obie tells Bruce every time somebody shoves a microphone in front of his face.”

“I’m sure it’s better than what you regularly shove in his face,” Everhart remarks dryly.

Stark shrugs and kicks his feet up onto the couch. “You know, I haven’t heard any complaints lately, but I’ll set up an online survey, get some feedback.”

“So glad you’re helping, Stark,” Phil informs him dryly, and Nick turns around to glance out the window at the park below.

Nick’d been bent over Stark’s desk with him and Pepper Potts a half-hour earlier when his assistant rushed in with the news that Everhart—public relations director for the whole county government—planned on stopping by to _discuss the issue about Mrs. Fury_. He’d dismissed his assistant as fast as he’d run in, but Stark’d just leaned back in his chair and let out a long whistle. Potts’d glared him into silence, but he’d still smirked as he folded his hands over his stomach.

After a couple seconds, Nick’d sighed. “What, Stark?”

“Nothing.” When Nick’d raised his eyebrows, though, Stark’d waved a hand at him. “Okay, well, it’s just that Everhart’s a tall order on her best day, which I’m sure this isn’t.” Potts’d smacked him with the file folder in her hand. “Hey, no violence when I’m being helpful!”

Potts’d scowled at him. “We need to talk about your understanding of the word ‘helpful.’”

“Since when is it _un_ helpful to offer up my expertise? Because my expertise is that Christine’s like a hellcat when she’s pissed off, and I think that’s important information to share with the class.”

“And why, exactly, would she be pissed?” Potts’d asked.

“Uh, because it’s a day that ends in Y?” Stark’d retorted, and Potts’d promptly rolled her eyes. Nick’d almost left them to it, turning back to the door so he could snag Phil before Everhart turned up at their doorstep, but Stark’d caught his attention by snapping his fingers. “Tell you what,” he’d said, and Nick’d glanced over his shoulder at the other man. “I’ll sit in with you. She interviewed me a couple times back before she turned into the county’s private spin doctor. I know how she works. I can, I don’t know, run interference so the whole thing doesn’t explode in your face.”

“I have Phil for that,” Nick’d pointed out.

“Because somebody who’s never known the touch of a woman who’s not his sister is a great middleman in a situation like this.” He’d pushed up out of his desk and reached for his suit jacket. “Pepper, hold my calls. Unless it’s the school, then forward it to Bruce, because I’m no longer allowed to talk to the principal without—”

“How many times did you sleep with her?” Potts had immediately asked, and Stark’d frozen with one arm in his jacket and one reaching behind his back. They’d stared each other down for a few seconds before Potts’d cocked her head to one side. “If this is the part where you try to convince me you never slept with her, then—”

“You know, I find it patently offensive that you’re asking a married man how many times he slept with someone not his husband in the long, lonely days before he—” Potts’s whole body, from her jaw right on down, had tightened into something two degrees short of a fighting stance, and Stark’d sighed. “Okay, fine, once,” he’d admitted. “Exactly the once.”

She’d nodded. “Good luck with that,” she’d informed both of them, and walked right out the room without so much as a second glance.

“Nick,” Everhart says after a long, heavy pause, and Nick draws in a long breath before he turns away from the window. She’s leaning back in her chair, her coffee mug balanced on a smooth, pale knee, but the whole of her attention is honed in on him. “This isn’t a case that’s gone slightly awry or Stark running his mouth in front of the press when he should really just shut the hell up.”

“Uh, hey, I’m right here, you know,” Stark complains from the couch.

Everhart ignores him. “This is your wife and your family. And as much as you’ve tried to make your campaigns about the law and about justice, that won’t work anymore.” She brushes her long hair over her shoulder. “The people of this county—of this state, really, because if you think your influence ends when you leave this building, you’re an idiot—trusted you, and you’ve betrayed that. You need to show them that you’re still the person they believe in.”

“At the expense of Melinda’s career?” Nick returns sharply. Everhart pushes her lips together into a thin, pink line, and Nick shakes his head. “She lost almost everything she had during the Essex case,” he says as he glances back out at the bare trees across the street. “The A.G.’s office froze her out, firms didn’t trust her enough to even bring her in for an interview, the law school laughed in her face when she offered to be a part time adjunct just to help pay the bills. I’m not dragging her through that again.”

“And the better option is to let the press rip you both to shreds?” Phil asks, and Nick frowns at his own hazy reflection the glass. “This won’t disappear because you don’t respond to it. It will fester like an open wound, and when it comes time for reelection, it’ll take fewer than a half-dozen attack ads to undo you.”

“He’s right,” Everhart agrees immediately.

“As uncomfortable as it makes me to admit it, I’m with the both of them,” Stark chimes in, too, and Nick grits his teeth as he twists away from the window again. Stark’s sitting like a normal person now, his arms stretched along the back of the couch. He shrugs. “Nobody who’s spent as much time avoiding the spotlight as you and your lady love wants to live in it, but sometimes, that’s the price we pay for working here instead of doing document review in the basement of some mega-firm.”

“It’s also the price some people pay in marrying you,” Everhart mutters behind her coffee mug.

“In both me and Nick’s cases, yeah, that’s probably true.” Stark pushes away from the back of the couch to lean forward, his fingers tangling between his knees. “But take it from the guy who ran and hid the second the going got tough: there’s always another microphone that’s gonna get shoved in your face, or a reporter hanging out just down the block, or a nosy blogger who finds your e-mail address on the bottom of some ten-year-old document. And unless you own it, it’s just like Bruce said this morning: it’s a shadow.”

He holds Nick’s gaze for a long time, leaving Nick to glance away. He studies Phil’s face, then Everhart’s, both of them serious and silent at the tiny table in his office. He’d interviewed most of his staff at that table—Stark, certainly, but also Rogers, Romanoff, Odinson, Barton, and Barnes. He’s lived thirteen years in this office, surrounded by these walls and windows and stealing ten-minute power naps on that couch back when Beth had colic. 

He pinches the bridge of his nose as he sighs, but ultimately, he shakes his head. 

“I can’t put Melinda through any more hell than she’s already been through,” he tells them, and Everhart’s fingers clench around her coffee mug. “And the harm I’d do to her by making a statement far outweighs the good.”

“You’re killing any chance you have at getting reelected,” Everhart responds. There’s something sharp and almost disgusted inching into her tone. “Do you understand that? In three years, your career will be over.”

“I guess that’s a risk I’m willing to take,” he tells her simply, and turns back to the window.

 

==

 

“You’re married to my boss,” Ward groans, rubbing a hand over his face.

“Technically, she’s married to your boss’s boss,” Fitz says comfortingly, and when Ward glares at him, he strokes the back of Ward’s neck.

Melinda rolls her eyes, more at Skye’s disgusted gagging sound than at Fitz comforting his boyfriend, and plays with the straw in her runny smoothie. She’d stopped by the cafeteria on her way back from meeting with Brand, not hungry as much as thirsty and fed up, and ducked into the line to order a smoothie and a sandwich. The cafeteria workers mostly ignored her, but the other members of the lunch rush—judge’s assistants, attorneys, security guards, even strangers—eyed her curiously as she waited for her order. She’d forced a tight, uncomfortable smile, and resisted the growing urge to call in sick for the rest of the day.

But she knew the massive draft opinion she’s spent the last three months writing and _re_ writing for Judge Hammersmith needed another round of edits, so she’d paid the cashier quickly and headed toward the back door of the cafeteria.

At least, until Skye’d grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to a table in the back corner of the room, half-hidden by a garbage can with an overflowing tray return.

Skye leans back to place her tray on the stack—Melinda suspects she built it herself as a makeshift barricade—and Melinda sighs. “I need to work,” she informs the group, and all of them, even Ward, lift their eyes to stare at her. “I know you’re probably worried about me—”

“Probably?” Skye demands. “Simmons almost cried.”

“She’s exaggerating,” Simmons defends, but a pink flush climbs up her neck. “I merely remarked that I was worried about you, given the seriousness of the accusations on that awful program.”

Fitz cocks his head at her. “And you teared up because . . . ?”

The table jumps as Simmons reaches over to smack him. “For the last time, I suffer from a rare combination of autumn allergies!” she snaps, and the other clerk scowls as he rubs his upper arm. 

Melinda rubs her forehead for a moment. “Well, worry or tears or _whatever_ , I’m fine,” she tells them. Ward, Fitz, and Simmons all frown while Skye scoffs and tosses her head. Melinda frowns right back at them. “What?” she asks, leaning back in her chair. “You heard the woman on the news: this is an old case. It’s not part of my life anymore. They fact that they’re turning it into a scandal a decade later means nothing.”

“Really? That’s it? ‘No big deal, I’m going to keep calm and carry on’?” Skye flops back in her chair and crosses her arms over her chest. “Twenty-four hours ago, you were freaked out about this enough that you accused me of being involved in this. And now, all of a sudden—”

“You _knew_?” Ward demands, and even though Skye freezes with her mouth hanging open, she falls perfectly silent as her self-proclaimed best friend stares at her. “This whole time we’ve been hanging out with her, you knew she was married to the district attorney?” Skye closes her mouth slowly, and Fitz and Simmons both drop their eyes to the tabletop. Ward throws up his hands. “You _all_ knew?”

“To be fair,” Fitz points out, “Beth looks a lot like her father.”

Ward blinks. “Beth? As in that kid who was over when we brought Skye the—”

“And when you consider the fact that Skye is not exactly a woman with a long list of dear friends—”

Betrayal flashes across Skye’s face. “Real supportive there, Jem.”

“—the most sensible assumption was that she belonged to our friend Melinda May,” Simmons adds. 

“And also,” Fitz finishes, “Beth told us her last name.” Melinda sighs, and Fitz scrunches up his shoulders. Across the table from him, Simmons smiles tightly and picks at the last crust of bread on her plate. “We just hope that you’re not mad. We didn’t tell anyone.”

“Least of all your boyfriend,” Ward mutters, and Fitz pats his hand obligingly.

Melinda rolls her eyes, but it’s more at the flash of anger that bubbles in the pit of her stomach than anything else. She’d sat in the parking lot of the Franklin County courthouse for a half-hour after meeting with Brand, her hands clenched around the steering wheel as she glared out at the bland October day. She’d wanted to do a thousand things in that moment—pick up the kids at school for a distracting afternoon, drive to San Diego on a whim and never once look back, hunt down Nathaniel Essex and pummel him into the ground—but instead, she’d sat, frozen by something dark that coiled in the depths of her stomach. She’d driven the hour back to work in a haze, replaying not only the newscast from the night before but also the Essex case itself: the cold indifference of the hearing room; the unsmiling disciplinary hearing officers who asked her questions as she testified; Brand’s unsympathetic stare following her throughout the proceedings. The past looms over her like a shadow, and now her friends are staring her down.

She runs her fingers through her hair. “I can’t do anything about this,” she informs them, shaking her head. “I’m not authorized to discuss any disciplinary case but my own, and anything I say about my past will only hurt Nick and the rest of his office.” She catches Ward’s eyes, and he nods slightly in agreement. “I think the disciplinary administrator’s looking into the situation, or at least monitoring it, but short of hunting down the people responsible and forcing them to retract everything they’ve said, there’s nothing—”

“Yeah, but we can do that,” Skye breaks in. She leans forward on the very edge of her chair, spreading her hands on the table. “Don’t you get it? Ward used to work in county government, so he knows people from all different walks of life. I can find just about anyone with ten minutes and a Google search, and Fitz-Simmons can—”

The clerks both raise their eyebrows at her. Melinda purses her lips to hide the start of a smile.

Skye, however, just waves her hand. “We’ll figure something out for them to do,” she declares, and immediately ignores their matching frowns. She glances over at Melinda, her face open and eager. “If these people have Facebook accounts, or they keep a tumblr, or they watched Nyan Cat one too many times while logged into Google Plus, I’ll find them, and when I do—”

“You’ll do what?” Melinda asks, and Skye snaps her mouth shut. Melinda tips her head back until it rests lightly against the wall behind her. “I know you mean well,” she says, “but there’s no revenge to exact here. The newscast left out parts of the truth, but it never lied. And even if the people passing out this information are attorneys, the worst they’ll get is a slap on the wrist—if that.” She shakes her head. “Sooner or later, Nick’ll make a statement and the feeding frenzy will die down. I just have to wait it out.”

“And you’re okay with that?” Ward asks. When she looks over at him, he raises his hands in a shrug. “I won’t complain if you are, but— You used to be the top litigator in this state, the kind of person who never rolled over and showed soft belly. Waiting for everybody to forget doesn’t seem like your style.”

Melinda forces a tiny smile. “A lot of things have changed since the Ramsey murders,” she replies quietly.

“Yeah, but I have a hard time believing that _you_ changed that much,” Skye retorts, and Melinda sips her smoothie instead of answering.

 

==

 

“Where’s your mom?” Nick asks when he finds the boys screwing around on the iPad, and they drop the tablet like somebody’s just lit it on fire.

It’s later in the afternoon than when he normally strolls in after work, and he feels the stress of the day bunching in his shoulders and back even as he slings his briefcase onto one of the kitchen chairs and strips out of his jacket. The kids usually bum-rush him at the door with stories or arguments, but today, his sons glance nervously at one another in the ever-dimming fall sunlight. The tinny video game music is the only thing keeping the heavy silence at bay.

Heavy silence’s followed Nick around all day, trailing him down the hallways at work as he tried to keep on task in an office of questions. Its fingers dipped into everything: his meetings with his staff, his phone calls (both about work and to warn the school about asshole reporters crawling all over), his approval of Everhart’s bland _Suffolk County refuses to comment on recent news stories at this time_ press release. Even now, in the sunny kitchen with the cabinets he and Melinda re-stained themselves a couple years back, he feels the shadow of the day reaching out and coiling around him.

Jackson, on the other hand, rolls his eyes. “Don’t scare us,” he says, and picks up the iPad.

Nick blinks at the two of them, and Alex dips his head away to avoid eye contact. Nick frowns. “That doesn’t answer my question,” he points out.

“Mom’s in the basement,” Alex volunteers.

“Yeah, and she paid us twenty bucks to keep Beth busy and not let anybody bug her,” Jack adds. He’s so intent on his damn game that he misses Nick crossing the room in a couple big steps and snatching the tablet right out of his grip. “Hey!” he complains when Nick exits out of the application and locks the screen. “We were using that, not just—”

“I will ground you until you are twenty-three years old, Jackson,” Nick warns, and his kid crosses his arms as he casts his eyes down at the floor. He shoves the iPad on top of the fridge for good measure. “If your mom’s downstairs, where’s your sister?”

Alex shifts around on his stool, rocking it slightly, and sits on his hands. “We put on _The Little Mermaid_ ,” he says. Jackson elbows him, and he slaps his brother hard on the arm. “She’s kind of freaked out.”

“She’s being a wimp,” Jackson shoots. Nick narrows his eye at him, but he huffs and folds himself up tighter. “She’s pouting like the whole world’s ending because of all the crap on TV. Like it’s actually a big deal.”

“It _is_ a big deal,” Alex counters. He tosses Nick a quick glance. “There were reporters outside the school. They made the security guard go scare them away.”

Jackson snorts and rolls his eyes. “See, this is what I mean,” he says, and Alex screws up his face in response. “They’re scared of everything, but I’d be cool talking to a reporter. I’d tell them they’re liars who don’t know anything about our parents.”

“And then, they’d twist everything around like they did to Mom and you’d look stupid,” Alex retorts.

“Enough,” Nick cuts in, and Jack snaps his jaw shut instead of sniping back at his brother. They both glance across the island and up at him, and Nick sighs. Different as they are, they both boast their mom’s dark, hopeful eyes. For a second, Nick just wants to gather them up like when they were toddlers and hug them ‘til they squirm. Instead, he shakes his head. “First, if a reporter even within ten feet of you, I don’t care how tough you think you are, you walk away and find an adult.” Jackson snorts while his brother nods. “And second: I’m sorry.”

Alex almost falls off his stool in surprise. “Does that mean Mom—”

“No,” Nick answers, shaking his head. “No, your brother’s right about most everything on the news being lies. I’m just saying that I’m sorry this is happening.” He shifts his gaze to Jackson and watches as the fight slides out of him. “You kids don’t need to be wrapped up in all this.”

“We can handle it,” Jackson informs him. He elbows his brother into nodding.

“Maybe,” Nick replies with a shrug, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t apologize anyway.”

He hands them back the iPad and then squeezes both their shoulders, one after another, before he wanders out of the kitchen and into the living room. Beth sits in the middle of the couch, a blanket over her head and around her shoulders like a cowl while Sebastian belts out his big number about living under the sea. 

Nick circles the couch and sits down next to her. She pushes her curls out of her face before she glances at him, and her eyes immediately fill up with tears. “C’mere,” he says, and when he lifts an arm, she burrows into his side like a much smaller kid might. He leans down to kiss the top of her head, cowl-blanket be damned, and squeezes her in close. 

They sit there for a good ten minutes before Beth tips her head up and asks, “Is Mama in trouble?”

He smiles at her and brushes the blanket and her hair off her forehead. She’s usually a little adult, full of solutions and bluster; it’s pretty easy to forget that she’s only eight. “No,” he says after a second, “your mom’s not in trouble.”

“Are _you_ in trouble?”

“Nobody’s in trouble.” She presses her lips into a tight, worried line, and he sighs as he straightens out her blanket. “Sometimes, when people only hear part of a story, they fill in the rest with things that aren’t really true,” he explains, “and it hurts the people the story’s about.”

Beth frowns. “That’s lying.”

“Yeah, it is,” he replies. Her brow scrunches, and he chuckles as he strokes his thumb over the creases. “But it’s gonna be okay. Me and your mom? We’ve got this.”

“You said that about the dishwasher and then we had to get a new kitchen floor,” Beth informs him.

“And you promised that you’d never bring that up again,” Nick retorts, and she laughs when he tweaks her nose.

He leaves her on the couch with Ariel and her sea friends and heads downstairs, the steps creaking under his weight. The basement’s mostly a man-cave for the twins, a place for them to store their noisy-ass remote control cars and to play video games without waking the dead, but it’s also the home to their treadmill, Melinda’s ridiculous workout ball, and right now, silence. Half the lights are off, and Melinda’s shadow stretches long and lean across the carpet like something out of a horror movie. 

He walks over slowly, careful not to break her concentration, and crosses to lean against the wall. She rolls her eyes at him, but everything else remains even: her steady breathing, the motion of her hand in the air, her perfect pose.

“The kids aren’t allowed to interrupt me when I’m doing tai chi,” she points out, her jaw barely moving. “Why should you be any different?”

He shrugs. “I don’t ask a thousand questions about dinner, for starters.”

“Maybe not today, no,” she replies as she shifts positions. Nick thinks he catches the corner of her mouth curving into a tiny smile, but then he’s studying a half-different other curves: the shape of her thighs and back, of her shoulders and arms, of her bare neck. He’s admiring the cut of her yoga pants when she volunteers, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Her eyes flash in his direction, and he raises his hands. “We don’t have to talk about it,” he replies, and she immediately glances away again. “We can talk about the weather. Work. The kids. I think Phil and Clint are leaning toward some kind of vanilla bean monster for their wedding cake, if you can—”

Melinda breaks her pose just enough to cut him off with a full-on glare. He drops his hands back to his sides—lowering his defenses, a dangerous thing to do in front of a pissed-off double black belt—and watches as she changes into a new position. She breathes in and out, rock-steady and unblinking.

He wishes he felt that rock-steady, right about now.

“We need to be able to talk about this,” he says after a couple more seconds, and Melinda flinches as she focuses on a spot somewhere in the middle of the nearest wall. “I spent all fucking day in and out of meetings, listening to bullshit about how I need to jump up and defend you like some white knight on a horse, and you know what I kept thinking?” She moves into another pose. “I kept thinking about everything we did to avoid this. How we moved, how you stopped litigating, how we avoided everybody we knew except Phil. We got married out of town, we threw our kids in private school to keep them out of the spotlight, we buried this like the pharaohs of old, and for what? For Essex to fucking raze our lives just because he’s bored?”

“No,” Melinda replies. She steps out of her last tai chi position and rests her hands on her hips, her whole body tightening up like somebody’s just pulled her taut. “He’s moving to have his law license reinstated.”

Nick stares at her for a second, his mouth hanging open like the first time Melinda flirted back at him all those years ago. “He’s _what_?” he finally blurts. “He got disbarred.”

“According to the rules, any disbarred attorney can petition for reinstatement after five years,” she replies. She shakes her head. “I don’t have anything concrete, but I’m working on a solution.”

“ _You’re_ working on a solution?” Nick cuts in. She rolls her lips together, her jaw hard as steel, and he pushes off the wall to close the distance between them. “You’re not the only one affected by this,” he reminds her as she glances at the nearest wall. “My staff’s got a thousand questions I can’t answer thanks to all the confidentiality rules around the Essex case, Everhart wants me to write an ode to your righteousness and shout it from the rooftops, and our kids are convinced that we’re in trouble and they need to set the record straight with the press.” She whips her head back toward him, and he places a hand on her arm. “You’re not the only person fighting against him. Not this time.”

They stare at each other for a couple seconds, her face caught up in some unreadable emotion that makes his gut clench. In the end, though, she sighs as she steps away. “What happened with Essex is my fault,” she says, “and I’m going to fix it.”

“And what about me, huh?” Nick demands. Melinda glances away, and he throws up his hands in frustration. “Last I checked, we said we’d fight shit like this out ‘til death do us part. You just gonna refuse that part of the deal?”

“No,” she responds, her voice low as a whisper and cold as ice, “but I am going to refuse to make the man I love into collateral damage.”

 

==

 

“Ah, Madeline, hold my calls,” Nathaniel Essex says as he walks into his office, and Melinda May sets his paperweight back down on his desk.

Essex’s pretty assistant, a redhead in a skin-tight black dress and ridiculous platform heels, nods before she scurries out of the room, Essex smiling all the way. The fall sun slants across the late afternoon sky, leaving big patches of light on the beige carpeting. Essex walks around the largest patch and heads for the minibar at the side of the room. “Drink? I’ve heard researching is thirsty work.”

“I don’t drink in the middle of the afternoon,” Melinda replies.

“Well, more for me, then.” He uncaps a glass decanter and pours two fingers of something amber-colored into the bottom of a tumbler. “Credit where credit is due, you waited until Thursday to hunt me down. Your husband must be squirming behind his eye patch.”

Her shoulders tighten. “This has nothing to do with my husband, and we both know it.”

“Yes, but it is fun to toy with you,” he responds, and he tosses Melinda one half-amused glance before he caps up the bottle.

The last three days still feel like three lifetimes, every hour stretching out so far that she swears that she’ll snap. She’d filled the time as best she could, diving face-first into work projects and elbow-deep into recipes at home, but nothing’s helped clear the churning storm clouds all around them. Nick stalks through hallways like an army commander, barking orders at their children and—at least, according to Phil—to his staff, his face cold and calculating even when he pauses to rest. Melinda’d watched him sleep every night, studying the worry lines on his face until she’s drifted off, herself. Every afternoon, Christine Everhart’d e-mailed her and encouraged her to _talk some sense into her husband before he burns the county down_ ; every afternoon, Melinda’d deleted the e-mail and returned to her case file.

She’d woken up before Nick on Wednesday morning and thrown on her sneakers for a long jog. By the time she’d returned to the house, Peter Parker and a couple other reporters were gathered around a news van, drinking coffee and chatting pleasantly. She’d rolled her eyes at them as she grabbed the newspaper and headed for the stoop.

“You know they’re waiting for him to say something, right?” somebody’d asked, and Melinda’d whipped around to find Peter hovering a couple feet behind her. He’d raised his hands in surrender. “Everybody knows you can’t talk about what happened because it’s confidential, but Mister Fury . . . ”

He’d trailed off to nod at the house. Melinda’d pursed her lips into a tight line. “It’s none of your business,” she’d said after a couple seconds.

“Yeah, I _know_ that, but it is all of my job.” He’d shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Look, just tell him that I’m sorry, and that this is ridiculous, but that he’s _got_ to say something.” He’d caught and held Melinda’s eyes. “Otherwise, it’s not going to stop.”

They’d stared at each other for a long time before Melinda’d said, “Have a good day, Mister Parker,” and walked away.

And ten minutes later, once she’d showered and started waking the boys, she’d sent a one-line text message to Skye: _Find me Nathaniel Essex._

Nathaniel Essex sips his drink slowly, his dark eyes glinting in the sun as he steps away from the bar and into the light. He’s a tall, broad man with classically handsome features, and even now, he carries with him an air of absolute confidence. Melinda remembers her heart stuttering in her chest the first time they shook hands, and the warmth in his face the first time he smiled at her.

His smile burns slowly, today, and with an edge of menace. “By all accounts,” he says, sounding almost amused, “I live and work in South Carolina.”

“Except for the fact that you bought office space in this building,” Melinda replies. She gestures at the room, and he lifts a shoulder in a small shrug. “I’m not sure if you’re renting your house or just living with a friend, but you own this floor.”

“You were always so very clever.”

“I’m still pretty clever,” she returns, and he chuckles as he turns toward the window. They’re three blocks from the capitol, and from their vantage point in the corner office, the dome looms larger than life over the rest of downtown. She rounds the desk to stand a few feet away from him, peering out on the same skyline and mapping out all the buildings she once knew by heart: the attorney general’s office, the Supreme Court building, the towering office complex housing most of the state’s executive agencies. “Not much has changed in the last fifteen years,” she observes.

“Except the tide, Melinda,” Essex replies. She glances over at him, watching as he swirls his drink around in the glass. “Back then, we cared about the integrity of the system, of ensuring that the attorneys walked out of the courtroom with clean hands regardless of the result. Now, we care much more about whether the boy with the Skittles receives the justice he deserves.” He casts his eyes in her direction. “You can’t tell me I’m wrong.”

She feels her jaw tighten. “That doesn’t excuse what you did, Nathaniel.”

“Doesn’t it?” He knocks back the last swallow of his drink in one crisp motion and then abandons the glass to cross his arms over his chest. “Let’s review the evidence, shall we? Anthony Prescott’s friend and occasional drug dealer reported that Prescott owned a knife like the murder weapon, which differed significantly from the knife we found on the scene. The blood of some unknown third person was discovered on the porch steps up to the Ramseys’ house.” He shakes his head. “Do you know what real prosecutors call that kind of evidence?”

“Reasonable doubt?” Melinda ventures.

“A distraction,” Essex snaps back, and she rolls her eyes as she looks back out the window. “Because no matter how compelling a case you assemble—or how damning the rest of your proof may be—the jury will remember that evidence, and they _will_ acquit.”

She snorts. “Can’t be that compelling of a case if distraction wins out,” she retorts smoothly.

“Says the former prosecutor—and current _research attorney_ ,” Essex snidely returns. She twists around to glare at him, and he raises his hands. “I apologize for my tone, if not my statement,” he says, and she draws in a long breath as she rests her hands on her hips. “But tell me, did you really come to relive the fifteen-year-old disappearance of evidence from a case long forgotten? Or is something else bothering you?”

He closes the distance between them with small, even steps—a lion stalking its prey, Melinda thinks—and she squares her shoulders. “You know why I’m here.”

“I’d like to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth—so to speak.” 

His smile, cold and humorless, slices into the softest part of her stomach, and she swallows tightly. She’d rehearsed this conversation over and over again on the drive up to the capital, her mind racing as fast as her car; now, all the words evaporate like steam. Essex stands all of eighteen inches away from her, his face calm and almost amused, and for the first time all day, her chest seizes up.

She ignores it to meet his eyes. “Retract whatever you or your cronies told Tilby,” she says, and the lines around his eyes bunch suddenly. “End this before Nick pays for your little rape-and-pillage mission.”

“Or?” Essex asks, and somewhere in the back of his tone, Melinda swears she hears him chuckle. He steps away, his hands raised in something like defense, and shakes his head. “You forget how negotiation works, Melinda. You can’t simply expect something for nothing—a _quid_ without its _pro quo_ , if you will.”

Her fingers dig almost painfully into her hips. For the first time since she’d left Suffolk County that morning, her heart jumps into her throat. “What do you want?”

“I take it on good authority that the district attorney of this fine county won’t be running again in 2015,” Essex responds, sliding his hands into the pockets of his slacks. “Grant County will need someone to take her place, someone unwilling to let the criminal element slip through his fingertips. And if five or ten years after that, the new district attorney plans on running for attorney general— Well.” He shrugs slightly, a smug grin crawling across his face. “I can’t win either of those elections without my law license—and your help.”

Melinda’s stomach lurches hard enough that, for a split-second, she thinks she might be sick. She shakes her head quickly. “I won’t lie for you,” she says, her voice catching somewhere in the back of her throat. “Reneging on my testimony after fourteen years would be—”

“Oh, no, I’d never ask you for that,” Essex cuts in, holding up a single hand. “No, if you changed your testimony now, you’d either look insane or like a blackmail victim, and no one wants that.” She snorts and rolls her eyes as he shakes his head. “But to have my accuser testify that she feels I’ve redeemed myself and that she supports my reinstatement?” He lowers his hand slowly and shrugs. “I may be able to issue a statement that ensures the _taxpayers_ of this state that you and your husband are the most ethical attorneys I know.”

He leans on the word _taxpayers_ , and Melinda feels her whole body tense. “What makes you so sure that Nick won’t issue a statement about this tomorrow?” she demands, and Essex chuckles as he crosses his arms. “You can’t hurt my career, but you know I’ll keep you from hurting his,” she presses. “But the second he defends against these allegations, you lose your bargaining chip. People trust him. They’ll take his word for it when he says he’s not involved.”

“Do you really believe that dear, noble Nick Fury will open those floodgates?” Essex returns, and the breath stills in the depths of Melinda’s chest. “The man who stood by your side as the attorney general’s office left you in the cold, the man who abandoned his aspirations to become district attorney of a medium-sized county— Do you really believe he’d allow the tide of public opinion to turn against his wife?” 

“Nick’s not that noble,” Melinda replies quietly.

Essex raises his eyebrows. “He’s not?” he questions, and Melinda grits her teeth as he closes the distance between them. “Hiring Tony Stark when no firm in the state would touch him? Retaining that new attorney after he was suspended?” He shakes his head. “When he believes in something, your Nick is unfailingly loyal—and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that he most definitely believes in you.”

Something white-hot flares up from the depths of Melinda’s stomach as soon as he says it, and she twists away from him, back toward the window. Her hands tremble until she balls them into fists; she tries to breathe, deep and even, but it feels like there’s a lead weight sitting on her sternum. The sun’s dipped far enough behind the capitol that she can see her own face in the glass: pale, drawn, exhausted.

She rolls her lips together. Essex lingers a few feet behind her like a shadow.

“You waited,” she says quietly, shaking her head. “You waited until we were settled, until everyone trusted Nick. Until I’d have no choice but to play into your hand or watch my husband dismantle his career.”

“Actually, I waited until the woman in the position I wanted was retiring,” Essex replies with a shrug. “But it did all dovetail very nicely together, don’t you think?”

Melinda whirls on her heel, her fists clenching hard enough that she thinks she might cut into her palms with her fingernails. “I won’t lie to disciplinary committee for you,” she snaps. “Not when it gives you a golden opportunity to destroy more ‘distractions’ and rot the legal system from the inside out.”

Essex’s mouth curls into a smile that never quite reaches his eyes. “Then I hope you enjoy watching your husband’s career fall to pieces,” he replies, “because that is the only other option.”

 

==

 

“Nick, you need to do something about this,” Phil says at the end of the day Friday afternoon, and Nick thinks real hard about throwing a pen at his head.

The hallway’s dark and quiet as Phil closes Nick’s office door behind him, and Nick swivels away from it to stare out the window at the dimming October sunlight. The last five days have felt like a slow descent into madness, and the longer Nick watches the last fingers of light disappear behind the tops of buildings, the more he can imagine that his hope’s slipping away, too. He’d spent most of his morning ignoring phone calls from media outlets only to spend his afternoon ignoring e-mails from Everhart. He can guess the content without reading them, which probably explains why he deleted them all in one fell swoop. 

She’s away at some conference until Tuesday, but he’s pretty sure she’ll skin him alive the second she’s back in the building.

He looks forward to it.

“I thought we moved past the whole ‘silent treatment’ thing after that time I scraped your car on a cart return,” Phil comments after the quiet’s stretched on long enough.

Nick snorts at him. “You like leaving out the part where you let me think Melinda did it,” he retorts, and when he finally twists back around, Phil flashes him one of his wry little smiles. The guy drops into the chair across from his desk and starts loosening his tie. “Don’t you have a boyfriend with abandonment issues to get home to?”

“Usually, yes, but lucky for you, he doesn’t think you’re a threat to our relationship.” Nick rolls his eye at his cocky little smirk. “Plus, he’s smart enough to know that you’re hiding.”

“If by hiding, you mean working,” Nick returns immediately, and Phil raises both his eyebrows. They stare each other down like they’re playing some screwed-up game of chicken, and Nick leans back in his chair. “I know you people assume that my whole job involves holding staff meetings and scaring the interns—”

“And pissing off Stark,” Phil adds with a shrug.

“—but I’ve got the county commissioner breathing down my neck about re-upping one of our grants extra early, three different reports I’m supposed to write, and that’s not even counting—”

“The fact that you keep staying late so you don’t need to see the disappointed faces at home?” Phil cuts him off, and Nick presses his lips shut. His fingers curl on the arms of his chair without him thinking about it; Phil sighs in a way that says he noticed. He leans forward in his chair, his hands folded between his knees. “I’m not an expert in all this,” he says, his voice soft and low. “My integrity’s maybe been attacked once during my whole career, and never through somebody I love. But locking yourself in your office with reports and pretending like you’re the stone they can’t squeeze blood from isn’t going to solve this.”

Nick’s jaw clenches like he’s bracing for impact. “You think I’m not aware of that?”

Phil shakes his head. “No,” he admits, “but I think that you need to hear it from somebody besides Christine and Tony.”

A bitter bark that sounds almost like a laugh leaps out of Nick’s throat, and before he can track his own movements he’s out of his chair and pacing along the back wall of the office. He’d ditched his jacket and tie hours ago, rolled up his sleeves to work, and he feels bare from it, like he’s left his armor tarnished on the floor. 

“Did I ever tell you how long it took her to tell me what happened with Essex, back when this all kicked off?” he asks, and he glances over at Phil long enough to catch the beat of surprise that flickers across his face before he shakes his head again. “Six and a half weeks. She came home, she filed the disciplinary complaint, she started amassing evidence against him, and the whole time, she said nothing to the guy she came home to every damn night. It took ‘til she was drowning in it before she even said _half_ a word to me.”

Phil presses his lips into a tight, thin line, and Nick sighs as he glances back out the window. “Six and a half weeks,” he says, and he hears the way his voice keeps quiet, like he’s sharing a secret, “and I still jumped in head first to help her. And after all the smoke cleared, after the bastard lost his license and A.G. suggested that she maybe find herself a new job out of the limelight, we swore that we’d stop hiding from each other. Figured we did better as a team, a whole ‘greater than the sum of our parts’ thing, and we stuck to it. Except then, this all kicked off, and—”

He swallows around the rest of the sentence, trying to banish it before it rushes out of his goddamn mouth, and rests his hands on the window ledge. Ever since their conversation Monday night, Melinda’s crept around the house like a phantom, a shadow of the woman he’s spent the last thirteen years of his life with. He’s watched her usual warmth dull, watched her smooth edges chipping away until she’s rough and uneven, and his whole chest hurts every time he stops to think about it. Because the kids are upset, his staff’s confused, and he’s angry, but Melinda—

He’s pretty sure Melinda’s terrified out of her mind.

And he’s not sure how the hell he fixes that one.

He’s still staring out the window, the ledge’s sharp corner pressing into his palms, when Phil walks up to stand beside him. He tucks his hands into his pockets, but for a long while, he’s just as quiet as Nick is, his calm eyes tracing the long shadows of trees across the park.

“The reason you and Melinda work is because you’re so much alike,” he finally says, and Nick snorts at him as he shakes his head. “I’m serious. The first time she introduced us, during the investigation, that’s what I noticed. You’re both independent, stubborn, brilliant attorneys who refuse to let anyone see your softer sides. Actually, I don’t think I knew you had softer sides until you became parents.”

Nick allows his mouth to twitch into one tiny ghost of a smile. “You show a guy one picture of your twins,” he half-grumbles, and Phil chuckles next to him. “You have a point to all this, or are you just complimenting me on my marriage?”

“Can’t I kill two birds with one stone?” Phil asks, and Nick actually laughs at him, just for a second. Then, the guy shrugs and glances away from the window to catch Nick’s eye. “You’re both strong and proud, but now’s not the time to be either of those things,” he continues, and Nick looks down at his hands. “Melinda’d rather pick herself apart at the seams than subject you to the kind of flack you’re sure to get the second she opens her mouth—and you’re the same way with her. You both keep this on lockdown long enough, you’ll implode without any help from the news _or_ from Essex.”

“Give the guy one long-term relationship that’s not a fucking mess, he turns into an expert,” Nick complains, but the words come out more like a sigh than like a cutting retort.

He swears he can feel Phil smile. “Let a guy almost ruin his relationship because he’s too proud to admit he’s hurting, and yeah.”

Nick snorts at that and glances back out the window. The sky’s dark now, blue and purple instead of pink and gold, and he sees himself reflected in the glass. He looks just about as tired as he feels, his face slack and the circle under his good eye dark as a bruise. He needs a shave and, more than that, a good night’s sleep.

“I think she’s gonna self-destruct a long time before she implodes,” he admits when he finally glances away from his own reflection and over at Phil. “I think the longer this keeps up, the longer there’s press hanging out in front of our house and news reports about how we can’t be trusted, the more likely—” The words slip through his fingers for a second, and he sighs. “I think she’d rather just take the whole thing on her shoulders than risk it hurting the both of us.”

“Then maybe you need to cut the wire before that happens,” Phil suggests quietly.

Nick smiles a little and shakes his head. “And I would,” he replies, “if I knew where the hell to start.”

 

==

 

“You’re out of your mind!” Phil snaps at Melinda, and she throws up her hands as she stalks back across his kitchen.

Autumn Tuesdays are rare evenings in the Fury household because for two wonderful hours, all three children are out of the house at activities that don’t require their parents’ attention. As Melinda drags her fingers through her hair, Beth earns half a Brownie badge and the boys practice park district basketball at the community center, and all under the close supervision of _other_ capable adults. In about seventy-eight minutes, they’ll pile into their carpools and head back to the house for dinner and homework, but right now, Melinda and Nick are each free agents.

Except Melinda isn’t sure where her husband is.

She crosses to the fridge and throws it open, digging around for something highly alcoholic while Phil hovers and frowns disapprovingly. “I know that right now, it might seem like a good idea,” he presses, and she rolls her eyes as she fishes a beer out of a six-pack, “but when the dust settles, you’ll realize—”

“That I saved my husband’s career?” The fridge rattles when she slams the door, and she sets the bottle down hard enough that Phil’s jaw twitches. “That’s the outcome, isn’t it? Essex makes a statement, this bullshit ends, and Nick leaves with his job and reputation intact.”

“And your reputation?” His voice is quiet and tight, and Melinda ignores the question to dig around for a bottle opener. “You hardly escaped unscathed the first time, and you had the whole ethics commission backing you. If you do this now, when people already distrust you . . . ” He trials off as she flicks the bottle cap into the sink, his gaze hot on the back of her neck. “Brand will know you’re lying,” he continues after a few seconds, “and the rest of the disciplinary board and the ethics commission will, too. They’d be able to bring you up on charges if they want, say you weren’t candorous—”

Melinda snorts. “Because candor’s done so much for me in the past,” she snipes.

“And so your solution is to lie for the man who put you in this position?” Phil retorts sharply. She twists to glare at him over her shoulder, but he’s already rounding the island and closing the distance between them. “Melinda, Essex is playing you. He’s gaming the entire system and backing you into a corner. You need to tell Nick what’s happening so you can both—”

“For the last time, I am _not_ playing right into that bastard’s hand by involving Nick!” she snaps, and quickly steps away. She paces across the kitchen and back again, but try as she might, everything she wants to say jumbles together until she can do nothing but plant her hands on her hips and walk circles through Phil’s kitchen. 

She’d spent the whole weekend in the same sort of stupor, skimming internet articles about her so-called unethical behavior during the boys’ soccer games and Beth’s taekwondo class. Most local stations’d already dropped their coverage, moving on to newer, shinier stories, but legal bloggers across the country had started picking up the scent. Worse, somebody’d submitted a letter to the editor about unethical lawyers to the _Kansas City Star_ website, and her stomach’d dropped at the lynch-mob of comments that followed.

She’d eventually handed Jackson her phone. “Run down the battery doing whatever you want,” she’d told him.

He’d blinked at her. “Can I download a movie?”

“Download four if you want, you know the password for my iTunes,” she’d replied, and he’d cackled while his sister sparred with a couple other third-graders.

She’d considered warning Nick that the news’d started creeping eastward, but the man’d just drifted around their house like a ghost, shooting her sad glances every time she’d stopped child-wrangling long enough to sigh. At one point, they’d stood on opposite ends of the living room, staring at one another like strangers with nothing to say to one another.

Well, no. There was plenty to say. She’d rehearsed the words in bed one night, staring at Nick’s back in the dark. For the first time since Monday, he’d drifted into a heavy, snore-laden sleep, and she’d listened to the cadence of his breath as she practiced the explanation: _If I lie for Essex, he’ll call off his dogs. It’s the best of all possible outcomes. No one gets hurt._

But then she’d heard Nick’s voice like a whisper in her ear, reminding her about Essex’s “distractions,” and she’d rolled over and attempted to sleep.

Monday morning, they’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the front window as the last few industrious reporters settled in at the curb. 

“You gonna tell me your big plan, or am I gonna have to guess?” Nick’d asked, and Melinda’d jerked her head up in surprise. He’d watched her, his eye steady and solemn as it traced her face. She’d glanced back out the window. “‘Cause if you don’t trust me enough to let me help you, least you can do is give me a head’s up on how you plan on destroying yourself.”

Her shoulders’d clenched, and she’d curled her hands into fists. “I told you that I’m going to fix it, and I meant it. How I end up doing it isn’t—”

“Isn’t what? Isn’t my business? Isn’t something I should worry about? Isn’t something that _matters_?” He’d kept his voice down to a low growl, but somehow, it’d only tightened the knot in Melinda’s belly. She’d grit her teeth as Nick’d twisted toward her, half-dressed in his slacks and undershirt. “Fifteen years ago, you kept all the bad shit from me, and you know what? I stood up for you anyway. Brushed it off, figured that we were new and it was real hard for you to rely on _anybody_ else, least of all me. But guess what, Mel? It’s not 1998 anymore.”

“Meaning?” she’d asked briskly.

“Meaning that I’m done with you deciding what I can and can’t know just ‘cause the going got tough and _you_ got—”

“Because this is just about me and my problems, is that it?” she’d interrupted. Her voice’d cracked as she’d twisted toward him fast enough that he’d flinched back in surprise. “Because it’s impossible to think that I’m keeping this from you to _protect_ you. Right? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? That this is all one big selfish motivation, just like it was fifteen years ago!”

He’d sucked in a hard breath at that, the echo of a fight fifteen years ago that’d ended with her crying and him proposing like an idiot, and Melinda’d turned back to the window quick enough to wipe her fingers under her eyes. For a half-second, she’d remembered every detail of that fight: her bare feet on Nick’s crappy linoleum floor, the hurt in his voice after she’d finished explaining the charges against both her and Essex, the way he’d run fingers through her hair when they’d laid on the couch afterwards. The wave of nostalgia’d almost overtaken the wave of anger, too, until Nick’d said, “You don’t get to keep shit like this from me, Mel. Not anymore.”

She’d snorted at him. “And you don’t get to barge in when I tell you I’ve got a situation under control,” she’d returned, and stormed out of the room before he’d opened his mouth again.

They’d hardly talked Monday night, or that morning.

Her stomach twists in Phil’s kitchen, tying itself into another knot that threatens to leave her nauseated and teary-eyed, and she stops at his kitchen table to grip the back of her chair. She breathes around the sensation—part anger, part helplessness, part _fear_ —and listens to Phil sigh across the room. “Melinda—”

“I hate when you give advice,” she informs him. She tips her head back to stare at the light fixture until it hurts her eyes. “Because every time you open your mouth, you find some way of being _right_.”

He chuckles. “Clint says that a lot.”

“Then he’s smarter than I gave him credit for.” When Phil arrives at her side, he slides the beer in front of her, a tiny smile playing across his lips. She rolls her eyes at him and his stupid attempt at an olive branch. “I don’t know what else to do,” she admits as she loosens her grip from the chair. “If I don’t do what he says, Essex will keep playing this game. If I _do_ , I’m just as unethical as he is.”

Phil raises his eyebrows. “And if you tell Nick?”

“Then he spends the next six months of our lives trying to skin Essex alive while Essex finds new ways to pick apart our reputations.” She shakes her head. “There’s no way out.”

He smiles slightly, his lips pressed into a thin line, and reaches over to touch her arm. “For what it’s worth,” he says, “I think Nick’d rather lose the next election than see _you_ lose all your credibility with the legal community.”

She almost laughs. “I think he’d _say_ that,” she returns, “but at the end of the day—”

“Hey, boss?” a voice interrupts from the doorway, and they both twist to find Clint hanging from the doorjamb and flexing his impressive arms. 

Phil ogles them openly for a half-second before he asks, “What’d the cat do this time?”

“Uh, the cat’s okay,” Clint replies, “but Fury’s on the news, and he looks _pissed_.”

Phil’s eyebrows lift in surprise, but Melinda ignores that—and his meaningful little look at Clint—to stalk across the kitchen, squeeze past Clint’s shoulder, and emerge into the living room. The TV’s on but muted, and she fumbles around in the pile of remote controls in an attempt to find the right one. On screen, the county’s pretty public relations officer rambles about something, every sentence punctuated with a meaningful hand gesture. Behind her, the county commissioner and Nick stand shoulder-to-shoulder, two solemn men in the young woman’s shadow. The camera angle’s back far enough that Melinda can’t read anything but anger in Nick’s face. Her breath catches, her throat thick and tight as she tries to find the right unmute button.

“Here,” Phil says quietly, his arm bumping hers as he hands her the right remote. She nods jerkily at him before she thumbs the button.

“—out of proportion,” the PR woman finishes her sentence. Her hands fall to the sides of the podium for the first time since Melinda walked into the room. “Here to explain that—and to put these rumors to bed—is District Attorney Nicholas J. Fury.”

The room falls silent except for the mechanical click of camera shutters as Nick walks up to the podium, a black leather portfolio under his arm. He’s dressed head to toe in his favorite courtroom attire, a black suit with matching waistcoat and an equally black tie. 

“I like how scared people look when a big black man walks into the room without a hint of color,” he’d admitted to her once, a smirk crawling across his lips. “Plays into all their stereotypes.”

Melinda’d rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why I married you,” she’d commented, but she’d laughed when he kissed her, anyway.

She’s not laughing now, her fingers digging hard enough into her hips that they hurt as Nick flips open his portfolio. His eye flicks over his notes, and he nods to himself before he raises his head. He surveys the crowd—frozen and anxious, pens and cameras at the ready—before he finally pulls in a breath.

“A long time ago, I met a woman,” he says, and Melinda feels her heart leap into her throat. “This woman and I, we worked together. We fell in love. We eventually got married. And along the way, she became involved in a scandal.”

He rests his hands on the sides of the podium, staring out across the crowd. “There’s a lot I could say about what happened between Melinda May and Nathaniel Essex,” he continues. “I could tell you how what happened up in Washington County almost ruined a good woman’s career. I could tell you about the unjust way the former attorney general treated her, or about how slow the disciplinary committee was to come to her defense. And I could talk to you all about the man who put her in that situation, a man who’s not content to burn to ashes on his own but instead’s got to burn the whole world down with him. But the problem with that is how much it’ll feed this fire.”

He shakes his head, his hands lifting slightly. “I don’t wanna feed the fire. I didn’t when this started, and today, I _still_ don’t. But I’m not going to sit idly by while all of you—here in this room, out in your homes, on the internet—draw and quarter my wife because you _think_ you know our story. And if that costs me my job, that’s fine, because I won’t have it costing us our life.”

The camera angle zooms in on Nick’s head and shoulders, and for the first time since the beginning of his speech, Melinda can read all the emotions on his face: anger, worry, determination, and faith. She swallows hard as he draws in a breath, her shoulders tensing as though she’s waiting for a blow.

“Melinda May,” he says, “is one of the finest attorneys I’ve ever met. She’s smart, she thinks on her feet, and she believes in the law and in the profession. None of that’s changed in the last fifteen years. If anything, the last fifteen years’ve made that clearer.” His jaw tightens, and he lifts his chin a few inches in a silent challenge. “If you’re worried about this situation with her and Nathaniel Essex, the questions you need to ask are about him. About the man who got himself disbarred, who sullied May’s career, and who’s hell-bent on raking her back through the mud. And if, after you ask those questions, you still aren’t satisfied, there’s nothing else I can do to help you.” 

The sea of reporters (and some of Trish Tilby’s precious taxpayers, Melinda’s sure) bursts immediately to life, hands waving in the air and voices clamoring all over one another. But the words sound distant and foreign, like languages she’s never learned to speak. For a few seconds, she’s so focused on the television and Nick’s restrained, half-worried expression that she forgets they’re there at all; when Phil touches her shoulder, she flinches.

She realizes that she’s twisted her fingers in her necklace only when she untwists them. On the screen, Nick’s explaining that her job focuses on civil cases, away from anything handled by the district attorney’s office.

Phil’s eyes scan her face, and she forces herself to roll her eyes. “I’m fine,” she informs him, her heart still unsettled.

“You’re not a very good liar,” Phil replies, and she snorts as she turns back to the TV. 

She watches until the end of the newscast, her breathing slowly returning to normal as she listens to Nick field questions about their relationship—“No, we didn’t get married until after I ran for office, and it wasn’t intentional,” he snaps at one point—their professional lives, their time in Suffolk County and, at one point, their children. The tension that’s lived in her stomach for the last week uncoils slowly, untwisting its knots and kinks until she can finally fill her lungs again. When she releases her death-grip on her hips, her knuckles crack; when she drops her hands to her sides, her shoulders drop like she’s lost a battle.

When the story segues back to the glossy, tanned reporters in the studio, she glances over at Phil. “I need to go,” she informs him, and he smiles as, nodding, he steps out of her way.

She knows every turn and stoplight between Phil’s house and the judicial complex by heart, but her fingers still drum impatiently on the steering wheel when a red light traps her or an idiot on a glorified moped swerves into and then stays in her lane. Both the newsradio stations programmed into her car offer bits and pieces of the press conference as their “local news” highlights, and in her pocket, her phone buzzes repeatedly. She wonders at one point, stuck behind a rental truck at the longest red in the history of humanity, whether Skye and the others heard the press conference.

She almost wants to call them, ask what they think. More than that, she wants to apologize to them—and to Phil—for brushing off all their worry.

But there are other things she wants _more_.

She passes the truck and guns the engine.

The judicial complex is a ghost town by the time she swings her car into the parking lot, but she recognizes the black sedan in the assigned _District Attorney_ spot like she recognizes her own pulse. She’d goaded him into that car, vetoing his concerns about horsepower for ones about gas mileage and a trunk big enough for adolescent sports equipment. She’d won, in the end, and better: she knows Nick loves his car.

She parks her SUV next to it and slides out.

The October wind is strong and biting, rattling the last dead and dried leaves in the trees, and Melinda zips her windbreaker up to her chin as she heads for the back steps that lead into the building. She’s at the curb when the secured doors open, and she clears the first short flight of stairs just as Nick notices her. He stills at the top of the steps, one hand on the railing as he stares down at her, and Melinda ignores it.

He’s taller than she is, but she knows his weaknesses—which makes it incredibly easy to grab one flap of his open coat, pull him down to her level, and kiss him.

For one brilliant second, he’s slack in her grip, his lips parted in surprise. But then, he snaps like a rubber band, grabbing her by the waist as she reaches up and grips his neck. He pulls her bodily onto the top landing of the steps and they stumble together, clumsy like teenagers, Melinda protected from the wind by his arms and coat. 

She sighs into his mouth, and he takes full advantage. She scratches fingernails just behind his ear, and he moans softly.

They break apart hesitantly, the air frigid in comparison to the warmth of Nick’s mouth, and Melinda smoothes her thumb along his jaw as she smiles at him. “Hi,” she greets him. For some reason, her cheekbones warm.

“Hi,” he says back, as breathless as the first time she wrapped her fingers in the lapels of his coat and kissed him in the snow all those years ago. He smiles cautiously, like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. “Should I ask what all that was for?”

She snorts at him and shakes her head, but she smiles back, too. “You’re a stubborn asshole who refuses to listen to his wife,” she answers, “and right now, I love you for it.”

“I can live with that,” he replies, and spreads his hand on her back before he kisses her again.

 

==

 

“And in other news,” a pretty redheaded newscaster says a full two weeks later, her hands folded atop the news desk during the noon broadcast, “the hot-button political drama of the season came to a close today when the state disciplinary committee dismissed Nathaniel Essex’s petition for reinstatement and ordered that he refile no sooner than three years from now. Disciplinary administrator Abigail Brand had this to say.”

The footage cuts away to a harried-looking Brand in a dark green pants suit. She glares at the camera like it caught her off guard; given that she’s standing on the steps that lead up into the Supreme Court building, that might not be a bad assumption. “We carefully reviewed Essex’s file, but in the end, the severity of the charges against him convinced us that he needs another few years to consider his actions—and what he can offer to this community.” She shrugs and flicks her sunglasses back up over her eyes. “He might be reinstated eventually, but today is not that day.”

“This news comes as a surprise to very few,” the redhead says once she’s back on screen, “as many experts warned that Essex’s recent publicity would jeopardize his chances for reinstatement. Some even speculate that he hurt his own cause by appearing on a local Suffolk County news program and to explain the charges fifteen years ago—and to once again lambast Melinda May.”

“I understand why people would rally around Miss May,” a previously recorded Essex says, leaning closer to a primped-and-polished Trish Tilby on the _Suffolk County: Unmasked_ interview couch. “Everyone loves an underdog story, and it’s easy to paint this as the young attorney against the unethical old-timer.” He sighs like some kind of Victorian waif as he shakes his head. “But for her to imply that I’m somehow the bad guy in this sea of misunderstandings—and then to sic her husband on me—is patently ridiculous.”

The newscast leaves the focus on Essex for just one more second—the man’s skin is bleached-bone pale while his hair looks dark and greasy, just the kind of makeup you’d hope for when dealing with the guy who screwed over somebody you love—before the redhead reappears. “Meanwhile,” she says, “many people both inside and outside of Suffolk County have rallied around District Attorney Fury, applauding his support of his wife and—”

Nick shuts the TV off.

The last couple days of October’ve welcomed a very real winter cold snap, and as he turns away from the flat-screen on the wall and looks out the window, the park’s empty and bare. He misses the preschool kids who run around the playground while their moms watch and the bored college students who play hacky sack out on the lawn, but he knows that they’ll return soon as the snow shows up.

He likes the snow, for the most part. If nothing else, Beth builds a mean snowman.

He smiles for a second, thinking about that.

The two weeks since his press conference—a press conference that’d turned Stark into a smug lunatic for a couple days—have felt mostly like the first two weeks after some kind of resurrection, a whole new chance to stop sweeping shit under the rug. He’d laid in bed that Monday night, his heart choking him and his stomach turning itself in knots, convinced that there’d be a lynch mob outside his door Tuesday morning. He’d flat-out told his constituents that he’d lied to them, admitted to a family and a wife that nobody even knew about, let alone trusted, and as much as he’d painted a rosy picture at the press conference, he fucking _liked_ his job.

Around three a.m., Melinda’d pressed her face into her pillow and groaned. “You think too loud,” she’d grumbled.

He’d rolled over onto his side to study the line of her body in the dark. “You want me to stop thinking all together?”

“Until our alarm goes off? Yes.” He’d snorted and shaken his head, and within a couple seconds, she’d shifted around to face him. They’d stared at each other in the quiet of their bedroom for a long time. “Whatever happens in the long term, I’m here,” she’d said softly.

He’d smiled softly and reached over to push hair out of her face. “I never worried about that.”

“No, but I did, and you stayed with me.” She’d caught his hand, tangling their fingers together. “You weathered my storms even when I didn’t deserve it. I’m not going to look that gift horse in the mouth a second time.”

“You count all this, it’s technically the third time,” he’d retorted, and he’d finally laughed as she kicked him in the shin under the blankets.

In the end, though, he’d woken up to a groggy Peter Parker standing on his stoop with an extra-large McDonald’s coffee and a copy of that morning’s _Bugle_. “For you,” he’d said, and frowned when he realized he’d handed Nick the coffee instead of the paper. He’d switched them out quickly. “Figured somebody should be the bearer of not-horrible news.”

The not-horrible news’d involved a below-the-crease story about the press conference from the day before—and the number of calls the disciplinary committee’d been fielding about Essex and Melinda.

He’d smirked a little and counted it as his first tiny win.

The tiny wins’ve multiplied since Parker showed up with that paper, though, growing up all around him like summer weeds he can’t really stop. Chief Judge Hammersmith’d written a special letter to the editor about the integrity of all county employees and topped it off by sending a letter to the disciplinary committee that condemned Essex to hell and back. Stark, cornered by cameras outside a Stark Industries meeting, had fielded a dozen questions about their office with his usual diplomacy, ending the conversation by saying, “Look, my boss can be a pill, but I can’t imagine anybody else in his shoes, okay?” Phil’d talked him up at an ethics event at the law school, Everhart’d convinced some internet bloggers to take up his cause, and Melinda’s friends—

“You know I’ll kill you if you ever hurt her, right?” Skye from IT’d said to him one afternoon as she’d finished setting up a “general inquiries” e-mail address for the office. Nick’d raised an eyebrow at her, and she’d shrugged as she kept right on typing. “I get that you’re the big, scary district attorney with the hammer of god or whatever, but really: you hurt her, I’ll hurt you back.”

He’d bit down on the edges of a grin. “I don’t think my wife needs much protection.”

“No,” she’d returned, flipping her hair over her shoulder as she’d twisted to glance at him, “but that’s kind of the things friends do.”

(A couple days later, Grant Ward’d fumbled through a long, complicated apology about “hanging out with your wife when I didn’t know she was your wife, sir.” Nick’d almost hurt himself laughing once the kid’d left the room.)

He’s thinking about all this—the weird, complicated way his life’s twisted in on itself, not like a snake eating its tail as much as a bunch of wagons circling up for protection—when his office door bursts open. “I need you to help me _not_ kill Laufeyson and dissolve his body in a bathtub of lye,” Hill announces as she storms in and half-drops, half-throws a packet of papers onto his desk. “Because right now, that’s the only viable option, and I have a friend who can hook me up.”

“A friend who can hook you up with lye?” he asks as he walks over. He hides his smile by rolling his lips together.

“Former law enforcement. Knows all the tricks.” He raises an eyebrow as she tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and when she notices, she jabs a finger in his direction. “We are not talking about my personal life right now, we’re talking about Laufeyson.”

Nick raises his hands. “I wasn’t even asking,” he lies, and spins the papers around so he can see what they’re working with.

He spends the rest of the day working with Hill, sorting through the mess Laufeyson’d dumped on their office and separating the wheat from the bullshit. The end result leaves Maria with a seven-issue motion response instead of a twelve-issue one, but hey, you can’t win all the battles.

It’s only a little after five when he slings on his jacket and finally leaves his office. Phil and Barton emerge from Barton’s office as he’s heading toward the back stairwell.

Barton leans against his own doorjamb, effectively stopping Phil in his tracks, and crosses his arms over his chest. “According to the news at noon, things turned out pretty okay,” he comments.

Phil rolls his eyes. “Ignore him, he’s just practicing for his correspondence course at the Tony Stark school of unnecessary smugness.”

Barton grins at that, almost like he’s proud, and Nick thinks for a second about sending Stark some kind of _shut the hell up already_ fruit basket. Instead, he says, “I never thought it’d go any other way.”

Both of the guys raise their eyebrows, Barton with his lips pursed to keep from laughing, and Nick shrugs. “There are degrees of things turning out okay,” he elaborates. “I never figured it’d all end up rainbows and lollipops, but I never figured it’d crash and burn, either.”

“You could’ve lost your job,” Barton points out as he steps into the hallway. He and Phil start walking, their strides perfectly matched and their shoulders brushing even as the guy tosses a look back at Nick. “You could’ve lost everything.”

“I was never gonna lose _everything_ ,” Nick retorts, and he knows Phil catches his meaning by the way he touches Barton’s elbow to shut him up.

For the first time since probably mid-April, the boys’ bikes and Beth’s chalk aren’t strewn all over the driveway, a sure sign that winter’s finally coming. Nick parks his car under the basketball hoop, collects the mail, and waves to a neighbor—all the trappings of a normal guy come home to his normal life. The news vans feel like a bad dream all of a sudden, something his mind engineered to punish him for—

“Daddy!” a voice shouts, and Nick barely manages to turn away from the mailbox before Beth tackles him around the waist. He almost snaps at her about sneaking up on people, but then his baby girl’s beaming up at him and the half-second of anger seeps right out of him. 

He musses up the curls that are barely restrained by her headband. “You’re sure happy to see me.”

Her smile grows ten times bigger, if you can believe it. “I got all of my spelling test words right,” she reports, breathless. “Every one. And Mama said the boys have _never_ done that.”

Nick grins. “You happier about the grade, or the fact your brothers never got there?”

Beth tilts her head to the side, her nose screwed up in thought. “Can I be both?”

He chuckles. “Sure, baby, you can be both,” he promises, and he lets her cling to him as they walk inside.

The house smells like garlic and onion, and soon as they’re past the front foyer, Nick can make out the sounds of his life: the TV in the kitchen playing the news, one of the boys singing off-key along to his iPod, pots and pans banging around on the stove, a Disney princess warbling about love in the living room. Beth breaks away, probably to watch her Disney princess, and Nick wanders into the kitchen to find Melinda frowning at her iPad and Jackson—

“Okay, Dad’s home,” Jackson announces, and immediately drops his pencil. “I’m not doing any more of this.”

He gestures to the school books that are fanned out around him. Some of the pages are marked with bright orange sticky flags. “Tell your father how many missing assignments you have,” Melinda says without glancing up from her recipe.

Nick raises his eyebrows. Jack, on the other hand, wriggles around in his chair like a worm on a hook. “It’s stupid, I already got zeros, I shouldn’t have to—” Even with her head still tipped down toward the iPad, Nick can see Melinda’s jaw clench. Across the kitchen, their kid grabs his pencil. “Never mind,” he grumbles, and starts back in on his worksheet.

Melinda smirks down at the recipe, and Nick bends to kiss her on the cheek. “I gave birth to your clone,” she reminds him for at least the hundredth time.

“And you love it,” he retorts, and watches her roll her eyes before he heads up to change.

By the time he’s back in the kitchen wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt from a shamefully long time ago, Melinda’s browning something in the skillet and the newscaster’s rambling about the Nathaniel Essex situation again. Nick leans against the counter as they replay a couple clips from _Suffolk County: Unmasked_ , Essex’s greasy hair shining in the studio lights. Nick’s pretty sure Essex thought appearing on the show’d turn him into a martyr, the innocent attorney screwed over by power-greedy Melinda May and her shady husband, but the longer he talks in the clip, the more he sounds like a self-serving asshole. Melinda glances over at the TV to watch the last couple seconds of the story, a sound bite Nick’s heard a hundred different times in the last week.

“One of our duties, as attorneys, is to be honest,” Essex explains, leaning back on the interview couch. “Without the absolute trust of others—the public, our clients, our colleagues, the court system—the profession shatters like crystal.” He shakes his head, his face practically glowing white under the harsh lighting. “Every lie chips away a flake of that crystal and weakens it.”

“And you’ve never told a lie?” Tilby asks, her hands clenched around an _Unmasked_ coffee cup. “Never crossed that line?”

“It depends on where you place the line, my dear,” Essex replies, a slow smile slithering across his face in a way that makes Nick’s stomach turn.

The newscast flips back to the studio after that, a strong-jawed guy introducing the sports report, and Nick’s about to dig into the fridge when Jackson asks, “So, wait, is that it?” Melinda snaps her head in direction, her eyes narrowed to a terrifying glare, but Nick just raises a hand. “The whole big deal is that _that_ dude wanted to be a lawyer again? And we had reporters messing with us because of it?”

Nick rolls his lips together for a second before he nods. “That about sums it up.”

Jackson snorts. “No offense, but that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

The tension in Melinda’s shoulders slowly releases, and as Nick stands next to her in their sweet-smelling kitchen, surrounded by the noises of a daughter watching Disney and a son who can’t carry a tune in a damn bucket, he watches her mouth curl into a tiny smile. He remembers that smile from the first time they flirted, warm but still a little shy, and his chest feels too tight for a second. 

Then, she says, “That’s because it probably _was_ the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard,” and turns back to the skillet.

And right then, for what feels like the first time in a long time, Nick smiles.


End file.
